lundi 22 mars 2010

Announcing SeedKit project.

Those last few days, I had the oportunity to spend some time on my pet projects. Being far enough for now and waiting gladly for some external help, I am ready to announce one of them : SeedKit.

SeedKit is a runtime environment for hybrid Web-ui/GObject applications.
Taking advantage of Seed bug #612590, SeedKit provides a Webview whose Javascript context is filled with Seed-provided GObject symbols.
It makes possible the creation of a ui using standard Web technologies, such as JS, CSS3 and HTML5 bound to lower level events and behaviours of GObject based libs and DBus services (WIP).

All it requires is the path to an html file (defaulting to ui.html in CWD). This file can include js files calling into GIR-provided symbols.
You can pass --inspector to be able to inspect dom elements dynamically and --script=file.js for a custom initialization javascript file.
Some samples (Notifications, GIO, DBus...)are provided in the examples dir.

The project is still in its infacy and suffers from serious issues. Notably the DBus binding is not in a working state, seems like the js context is cleared after first-level imports or something.

TODO (as of now) :
- define a system-wide css file for common theming.
- add a developer mode, with reloading button
- create a bug tracker, an agile management tool, a website, ML
- fix DBus binding (exposes a customly created dbus connection within native code ?)
- add samples of web-services integration ( Evolution Contacts on a google map ?)
- a runtime for widgets ?
- see what s come next :)

The sources can be grabbed at http://gitorious.org/seedkit and you can mail me at scaroo@gmail.com, in the wait of a proper ML.
Any code, help or idea appreciated. Contributions welcomed :)