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SDK & IDE

GNOMers have leak that this year will work towards to provide a better documentation for their APIs and will eventually at some point release a complete SDK that will help people to get started without pain with GNOME Programming. Actually there is already a lot of work going on lately and cool contributors share their knowledge with us by writing guides.

If you want to help on this effort or just want to use them you can start here.

http://developer.gnome.org/gnome-devel-demos/unstable/

SDK (a well defined set of libraries) is obviously the most important thing as long as it comes together with Samples and Best Practices tutorials. Then we need an editor to actually start coding. A very good option is Eclipse as it provides Auto-Completion and access to API Documention -if we have set the libraries paths, something that I guess it cannot be done with G-I.

I have tried lots lots of editors (maybe more than Koreans MMOS that I’ve played) under GNOME and I am not quite happy from none of them. The last 3 years I am using exclusively Aptana (an Eclipse based IDE). The editor is fantastic in capabilities but the performance even with ORACLE’s Java in my Intel Ivy box is poorer than poor.

So, yes I am still chasing a good lightweight editor under GNOME and yes I will start GNOME Programming if GNOME provides documentation for JavaScript. It seems that GNOME will make my expectations true :)

GNOME IDE

Keep on mind that these are just initial designs and none more work has been taking place. That might never come or it might come after 2-3 releases. However the intentions counts ;)

Goals

Reduce the amount of work required to produce an app

Reduce the amount of specialist knowledge required to produce an app

Reinforce the recommended workflow for creating an app

Help to avoid errors

Support JavaScript as the first class language

Cater to individuals and small teams

Features:

Project creation / templates Set GNOME version Handle dependencies (particularly relevant for application bundles)

GUI editing

Code editing Code autocompletion Automatic testing for common errors View files side by side

Debugging / testing

Version control

Building

Integrated documentation

You can read more at:

https://live.gnome.org/Design/Apps/IDE

And watch all the latest designs at:

https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/tree/master/ide

DevHelp

I needed to use some GNOME functions and I used the DevHelp, that comes pre-installed in Fedora but, I was never paid attention to it and instead I was looking in the online docs. However it was proven much faster and convenient.

This is DevHelp 3.7.90 and it has docs for C and Vala.

Before you use JavaScript

Someone here let a comment and mentioned about the drop of GNOME Clocks from Python for Vala. I just quickly copy the reasons

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeClocks/ValaRewrite

Why We ran into some problems with introspection (in particular canberra, and maybe in the future direct access to low level C api for alarms on a suspended system, but also use of some new stuff like libgd and egglistbox without fiddling with g-i) and clocks is small enough that we felt a rewrite was easier than fiddling with mixing C modules and python. A secondary goal of the rewrite is to give another iteration of cleanup to the code, making larger use of .ui files, of GLib functions (GDateTime etc), and of new widgets (libgd etc) Note that we are not throwing away anything, prototyping the app in python has been great and much easier than dealing with a compiled language from the start Why not JS JS is now the “blessed” language, however it suffers from the same g-i problems of python. On the other hand I do not exclude a switch in the future as the platform gets fixed (notifications, better g-i. etc).

So if you want to start an application with JavaScript it might be good idea after you identify what libraries you need to use, to let a message to GNOME Mailing List, asking if GJS/G-I supports all the things you wish to do.