Writing Apps for GNOME *and* KDE?

Dr. Tom asks: "I want to write an application that will play nice with both the GNOME and the KDE desktops (and possibly others). Without having developed anything for either, and after glancing through some of the docs, it seems like GNOME apps need to be written with GTK+ while KDE apps need to be written using Qt. Since I don't want to write my app twice, I'd like to know if there are any tools/abstraction layers that I can use to get some desktop functionality without having to worry about which desktop I'm running on. I expect this problem to have relatively wide interest as I notice quite a bit of duplication of effort among the different desktop applications (Knotepad, Gnotepad, Kcalendar, Gcalendar, etc.). It would be nice if some of that code could be shared -- or are desktop apps doomed to be tied to a particular desktop?" I certainly hope not. Applications which work on both frameworks are a necessity if Linux is to become a choice for the general desktop user.

Comments

KDE & GNOME Development.

[jelwell]

I think this post is flaimebait. I'd like to moderate it down one point, thank you.

But seriously, it seems that in order to standardize gui development between the two managers one would have to create a markup language for displaying. We could call it AML (for Application Markup Language). Then we would just need a powerful event driven scripting language - call it lavascript (for Linux Application Visual Access Scripting Language). At this point *real* processing could be done through a network connection - even routed to localhost. Via a networking protocol (call it TCP/IP) and it could connect to CGI servers to do the processing. oh wait. screw it.

sub isWar
{
my($enemy1, $enemy2) =@_;
if($enemy1 != $enemy2)
{
return 0;
}
return 1;
}

sub flameproof
{
`echo @_ | /dev/null`;
}
while (&isWar(kde, gnome))
{
&flameproof("Joseph Elwell");
}

Re:No! No! NOOO!

[Guy Harris]

Think past the Linux box

KDE seems to run fine on my FreeBSD partition; I installed the 1.1.2 binary package a few days ago. Solaris binary packages also exist; people probably run versions from source built on other OSes as well.

Note that the KDE home page says:

KDE is a powerful graphical desktop environment for Unix workstations. It combines ease of use, contemporary functionality and outstanding graphical design with the technological superiority of the Unix operating system.

Note the lack of a certain word beginning with capital "L" in that; they're not targeting Linux, they're targeting UNIX-flavored OSes, including but not limited to Linux.

The GNOME site doesn't say "not for Linux only" on the home page, but the "What is GNOME" part of the GNOME FAQ says nothing about it being targeted only for Linux, and the "What are the system requirements for GNOME" part says

Currently, you need a machine with Unix or a Unix-like operating system installed, with the X Window System (X11R5 or later).

Again, note the use of the U word rather than the L word.

You're probably unlikely to get as much enthusiasm from free software developers for CDE as there is for KDE and GNOME until there's a free CDE implementation (speech, not just beer) - there's LessTif, but it's just a Motif implementation, not a full CDE implementation.

Need more data

[Ledge Kindred]

Let me preface this by saying I'm neither a GNOME nor a KDE hacker, however, I've used both GTK and Qt to bang together some silly little programs for myself.

The question doesn't seem to be adequate to an accurate answer. If you mean "If I use Qt, can I run my apps with GNOME and if I use GTK, can I run my apps with KDE?" the answer is, "Of course."

If you mean, "If I use gnomelib routines, will my applications run under KDE and if I use kdelib routines will my applications run under GNOME?" the answer is, "Of course."

If you mean, "How do I write an application that will work equally well with KDE and GNOME, including things like docking and interapplication communications and all the fancy stuff that make GNOME and KDE more than just fancy window managers?" I'm pretty sure the answer is "You can't yet."

GNOME is already pretty much "CORBA-ized" and KDE is at least partially from what I understand, with an effort to make it "fully CORBA-ized" by the next major release. (2.0) I know there is a lot of communication between the two camps to have a lot of their features interworkable. But then the question is, "What are the features of each desktop manager that you want to work with each other? Drag-n-drop? Docking? Do you want to be able to embed GNOME 'objects' in your KDE application? WHAT DO YOU WANT, MAN?!"

You're really probably better off joining the GNOME and KDE development mailing lists and asking the question there. You will probably get a flood of useful answers since it's been my experience from lurking in the lists that the developers of the two toolsets seem to be much less prone to the "[not my brand of desktop manager toolset] sux rox!" mentality and more of the "Well, obviously we like [x] because we're programming it, but if you want [x] to Play Nicely with [y] apps, here is what works and what doesn't work yet..."

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