[Portland] Consistent messaging

[John Cherry]

I have talked about this with some of you, but I am about to release an
article that introduces the Portland Project to the general public
(actually to the IT community through LinuxWorld Magazine).  We want to
be careful to set reasonable expectations and to avoid architectural
detail, but at the same time, readers (including perspective ISVs) need
to know what it IS.  Please check out the following text and .png.
Unless there are serious objections, this will be the text for the
article.

Cheers,
John

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When the rubber meets the road, user's don't care which operating system
they are running. They simply care that their application or set of
applications run on their desktop and that they can access their
investment of data generated through these applications. Thousands of
open source and proprietary applications exist which could be used on a
Linux desktop. However, once users are accustomed to their
application(s), they are hesitant to switch to an open source
equivalent.

So what can be done to stimulate developers and ISVs to develop or port
applications to Linux? There are a variety of market factors that
present a chicken-egg dilemma. Application vendors may not port their
application to Linux until there is sufficient market share to justify
the investment, and there will not be sufficient market share until key
applications are ported to Linux. The desktop architects realize that
they cannot address the market issues, but their focus is to make it
easier for application developers to write and port applications to the
Linux desktop. Perhaps the biggest impediment for application developers
is that they have to decide which desktop environments to support. In
some cases, they may only be able to justify a single desktop
environment such as KDE or GNOME. If a single port of the application
would work on any or all of the desktop environments, it would be a huge
gain for the application vendors and would keep the porting costs down.

The Portland Project was born at the Desktop Architects Meeting in
December to generate a common set of desktop interfaces and tools to
allow applications to easily integrate across desktop environments. The
approach is to create programming interfaces (i.e. libraries and tools)
which applications developers will use to access desktop capabilities.
This programming interface will abstract the application from the
desktop environment specifics. Software vendors will not have to
generate different application packages for different desktop
environments.
The Portland Project is working in concert with the Linux Standards Base
(LSB) to document and standardize the application programming
interfaces. The Portland Project interfaces will not break any existing
applications interfaces supported by desktop environments. In other
words, existing applications will continue to work even if they do not
employ the new Portland Project interfaces.

<picture goes here>

Is the Portland Project real? When will application vendors get to start
using these interfaces? The infrastructure will emerge first
(implementation of the components in the model above). The development
team is experimenting with prototypes now. Some courageous application
vendors are testing these prototypes. Jeremy White, a developer at
Codeweavers, recently commented, “I'm cheerful to volunteer as an ISV
guinea pig.” Lubos Lunak, a key Portland Project developer responded
immediately by pointing Jeremy to the code, telling him about the
handful of API calls that have been prototyped, and asking for
suggestions and feedback on the interfaces. The Portland Project is
real.


Source code: 
   http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/portland/portland/

Mailing list: 
   http://groups.osdl.org/workgroups/dtl/desktop_architects/mailing_lists/

Project Page: 
   http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Portland


The first capabilities to emerge from the Portland Project will likely
be things like the consistent installation, removal, and updates of menu
items, installing an application launcher onto the desktop, screensaver
management, and associating applications with specified MIME-types.


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