[Portland] What exactly does DAPI cover?

[Kevin Krammer]

On Thursday 06 April 2006 13:51, Martin Olsson wrote:
> Hello,
>
> After downloading DAPI I kind of got the feeling that it could be used
> only for a few specific tasks like opening a browser, getting an address
> book entry etc. But I mean, typically an app needs to do a whole lot more
> than that?

All Portland project related code is currently at preview stage, not a full 
featured 1.0 release.
Thus DAPI just covers the most basic tasks, to let developers at ISVs 
familiarize with the concept, ask for changes, etc

Have a look at the integration task list
http://portland.freedesktop.org/wiki/IntegrationTasks

It lists what people felt where needed for better desktop integration.

> Won't ISVs still have to choose either KDE/QT or Gnome/GTK for
> development? Or will DAPI later wrap _all_ GUI widgets somehow so that an
> application can be compiled into both "native KDE" and "native Gnome" or,
> like, ehm.. how does this DAPI thing work?

DAPI is not a widget toolkit, it is about gaining access to desktop services, 
i.e. functionality provided by the desktop APIs to their native applications 
but without requiring to compile or link against those APIs.

For example a native GNOME application could launch the preferred handler 
application for a file using gnomevfs_uri_show (IIRC), linking with 
libgnomevfs2.0, a native KDE appliation would use KRun and link with libkio

A DAPI application would link with libdapi and call dapi_OpenURL, which will 
transfer the call to the running desktop's native API. 

It's like a new view to already implemented functionality.

While DAPI will quite likely have access to certain GUI related portions as 
well, e.g. file dialogs, it is, from my understanding, not planned to be a 
toolkit wrapper. If you are looking for something like that you could find it 
with wxWidgets (not sure if they already have GNOME and KDE implementations 
or are still just at toolkit level on X11)

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer <kevin.krammer at gmx.at>
Qt/KDE Developer, Debian User
Moderator: www.mrunix.de (German), www.qtcentre.org
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