So far the IDE tools for developing GNOME Apps are Anjuta and Glade, but I think that most people use Eclipse+Plugins and gEdit anyway.
GNOME recently choose to promote JavaScript as the primary language for creating Apps for GNOME Platform and Allan Day designed a GUI for programming with the main focus in JavaScript.
SDK & IDE
GNOMers have leak that this year will work towards to provide a better documentation for their APIs and will eventually at some point release a complete SDK that will help people to get started without pain with GNOME Programming. Actually there is already a lot of work going on lately and cool contributors share their knowledge with us by writing guides.
If you want to help on this effort or just want to use them you can start here.
SDK (a well defined set of libraries) is obviously the most important thing as long as it comes together with Samples and Best Practices tutorials. Then we need an editor to actually start coding. A very good option is Eclipse as it provides Auto-Completion and access to API Documention -if we have set the libraries paths, something that I guess it cannot be done with G-I.
I have tried lots lots of editors (maybe more than Koreans MMOS that I’ve played) under GNOME and I am not quite happy from none of them. The last 3 years I am using exclusively Aptana (an Eclipse based IDE). The editor is fantastic in capabilities but the performance even with ORACLE’s Java in my Intel Ivy box is poorer than poor.
So, yes I am still chasing a good lightweight editor under GNOME and yes I will start GNOME Programming if GNOME provides documentation for JavaScript. It seems that GNOME will make my expectations true :)
GNOME IDE
Keep on mind that these are just initial designs and none more work has been taking place. That might never come or it might come after 2-3 releases. However the intentions counts ;)
Goals
- Reduce the amount of work required to produce an app
- Reduce the amount of specialist knowledge required to produce an app
- Reinforce the recommended workflow for creating an app
- Help to avoid errors
- Support JavaScript as the first class language
- Cater to individuals and small teams
Features:
- Project creation / templates
- Set GNOME version
- Handle dependencies (particularly relevant for application bundles)
- GUI editing
- Code editing
- Code autocompletion
- Automatic testing for common errors
- View files side by side
- Debugging / testing
- Version control
- Building
- Integrated documentation
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You can read more at:
And watch all the latest designs at:
DevHelp
I needed to use some GNOME functions and I used the DevHelp, that comes pre-installed in Fedora but, I was never paid attention to it and instead I was looking in the online docs. However it was proven much faster and convenient.
This is DevHelp 3.7.90 and it has docs for C and Vala.
Before you use JavaScript
Someone here let a comment and mentioned about the drop of GNOME Clocks from Python for Vala. I just quickly copy the reasons
Why
We ran into some problems with introspection (in particular canberra, and maybe in the future direct access to low level C api for alarms on a suspended system, but also use of some new stuff like libgd and egglistbox without fiddling with g-i) and clocks is small enough that we felt a rewrite was easier than fiddling with mixing C modules and python.
A secondary goal of the rewrite is to give another iteration of cleanup to the code, making larger use of .ui files, of GLib functions (GDateTime etc), and of new widgets (libgd etc)
Note that we are not throwing away anything, prototyping the app in python has been great and much easier than dealing with a compiled language from the start
Why not JS
JS is now the “blessed” language, however it suffers from the same g-i problems of python. On the other hand I do not exclude a switch in the future as the platform gets fixed (notifications, better g-i. etc).
So if you want to start an application with JavaScript it might be good idea after you identify what libraries you need to use, to let a message to GNOME Mailing List, asking if GJS/G-I supports all the things you wish to do.