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

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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