Archive for August 13th, 2005

Posted on August 13, 2005 - by jono

AJAX and GNOME

Awesome. It seems some bright spark has decided to create an AJAX PEAR module called HTML_AJAX. The good news is that the module has been officially released, seems to be developed by a competent hacker and also has a decent roadmap. I find the concept of a widget library particularly intriguing in the roadmap. to be honest, this is the way I want AJAX to work – I want to specify something to be updated and something to trigger updates. I am also pleased to see this has been developed for PHP 4.x. There are still many, many people running on pre-5.0 versions of PHP, and I am pleased to see key modules like this are not assuming that we are all running latest, bleeding edge, gritted teeth, SVN versions of PHP. Hail!

It is sad to see some more bickering of notification tomfoolery on various GNOME blogs. This was really kicked off with Davyd, moved on by J5 and then followed up by jdub. To be honest, I can see all sides of the coin here, but the issue of Novell and Red Hat developing large chunks of technology behind the curtain is quite a sticking point. I understand the challenges of releasing innovative technology that makes people choose your distribution, but when something fundamentally affects GNOME, it needs to be at least communicated with the community.

You can see this to a point with the web interface for Hula. Sure, it is being developed behind closed doors in the gasman’s cubicle, but they have communicated pretty well the kind of work that is going on. Many will see this as not perfect, but basic communication is essential, even if it does not factor in code, screenshots and novelty penguins.

Coming from KDE to GNOME, it is interesting to see the different social structures in both projects. On the KDE side, there was less of an old boys club. Within the GNOME camp there seem to be a number of specific groups that work together and sometimes spar across blog entries. These groups are unfortunately most typified by their workplace. I never really noticed this with KDE. The employers behind KDE development did not really subconsciously divide people into different groups. Then again, in the KDE world there seemed to be less celebrity. I find this kind of social analysis fascinating, although I am perturbed to promote anything with the word ’social’ in it otherwise I will start wearing sandals and sensible jumpers…

In other news, hacked more on the website fixing various interface bits. Still lots of work to do, but getting there…