[maemo-developers] Xlib on Maemo?

[From: Damian Frank]

Thanks for the quick reply!

On Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:29:35 -0600, Ville M. Vainio <vivainio at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 19, 2009 at 7:15 PM, Damian Frank <damianf at curl.com> wrote:
>> Hi! I'm working on porting an existing xlib-based application to the  
>> Maemo
>> platform. I'm trying to understand whether keeping xlib is a feasible
>> option. (I know very little about GTK development.)
>
> This sounded so psychedelic that I just had to look it up. Did you
> already check out GtkSocket / GtkPlug? Perhaps it could be possible to
> embed the hard-to-port part as a widget for otherwise-gtk application?

Psychedelic?  Oh dear, that's almost never an endorsement of a programming  
idea...  :-)

I checked out GtkSocket/Plug just now.  It seems like an interesting idea,  
but unless I'm mistaken, both sides still need to be using GTK since  
GtkPlug is just an implementation of GtkWindow.  So I don't think that  
removes the underlying problem, the worst of which is probably event  
handling.


> Also, did you explore the possibility of porting it to Qt? (since, as
> you said, you are not already familiar with Gtk+). Depending on your
> application, Qt might have something that would allow you to eliminate
> tons (almost all?) of custom gui code. What kind of GUI do you have?

I think I read somewhere that Qt was considered pretty heavyweight, given  
the constraints of the platform.  No?

In any event, it probably wouldn't save us any time over using GTK; we  
don't have any custom GUI code that we can do away with, since third  
parties depend on the code we use.  In any solution, for actual user  
interaction we're just going to be drawing and handling raw events.  It's  
just a question of what host API underlies it; if we can use xlib for it,  
then we already have that code written.  If not, I have to get my hands  
much, much dirtier.  Does that make sense?

Does anyone know about using maemo input methods without GTK?  I suspect  
that it cannot be done, and that most likely settles the question for us.   
But it would be nice to have confirmation.

-- 
Damian