lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[PCMan <pcman.tw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Alexis Lopez Zubieta <
azubieta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Thanks for your replies Klaus Knopper and PCMan.
> As I understood you are planing to use an structured approach to create
> lxpanel2 and the rest of the LXDE desktop environment.
> Now I want to expose something. I'm an student of informatics engineering
> in the UCI where I learned to design and create applications with Object
> Oriented techniques. But when I came to the world of LXDE I found that
> there is not an object in the whole code and also I didn't find any design
> or  model of the programs that you build.
> So two questions come to me:
> - Are you designing the aplications before start to write code?
>
Sure, but I did not receive any formal training and taught myself
programming with books, other OSS projects, and, google only.
So the design can be a little bit weird sometimes.
GTK+ itself is designed in a fully OO way and uses a lot of design
patterns, but it's written in C.
However there is no language support for objects in C. We only have struct
+ functions.
A virtual function table in GTK+ world is a C struct which needs to be
filled by hand.
Things does not look like OO initially, but its spirit is OO sometimes.

> - How do you do it? (wich engineering thechniques do you use?)
>
None. I did try and error in the past.
Now I often tried to figure out the design/interfaces/APIs first, and start
implement them later.
For the GUI programs, now I tend to design the GUI first.

Regards
> Alexis.
>
> ------------------------------
> *From: *"PCMan" <pcman.tw@xxxxxxxxx>
> *To: *"Klaus Knopper" <lxde@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> *Cc: *"Alexis Lopez Zubieta" <azubieta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "lxde-list" <
> Lxde-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "lubuntu-desktop" <
> lubuntu-desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> *Sent: *Wednesday, December 28, 2011 4:58:39 AM
> *Subject: *Re: [Lxde-list] About lxpanel2
>
>
> If your "object oriented" refers to the programming language, I'm using
> Vala now, which is a OO language built on top of GObject/C runtime. The
> language itself is OO. This, however, does not mean that the program
> written in it will be OO.
> I'm not a fan of "making everything an object" approach. No single
> programming style is best for all cases.
> Using too much OO stuff in GObject will create extra overhead as its type
> system is all created at runtime.
> Type-casting and virtual function calls sometimes requires looking up in
> tables. Signal emission in GObject/C
> is also very inefficient, too. So basically, I'd avoid "unnecessary" OO
> whenever possible.
>
> If the term "object oriented" here refers to making everything on the
> desktop an object, that's a totally different thing and is not related to
> language used.
>
> On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Klaus Knopper <lxde@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> Hi PCMan,
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 03:21:02PM +0800, PCMan wrote:
>> >    On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 11:05 AM, Alexis Lopez Zubieta
>> >    <[1]azubieta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >
>> >      I have a question about lxpanel2.
>> >      Are you planing to make it using an object oriented approach?
>> >
>> >    What do you mean by object oriented approach?
>> >    I don't understand what you mean. Any examples?
>>
>> I THINK he means whether or not you will be using an object oriented
>> programming model and programming language (or interpreter on the
>> runtime or macro level), which has certain advantages (everything like
>> programs, icons, files, windows etc. are objects where all the code
>> needed to manage the object is included in the objects class, and not
>> spread across different places in the code), and disadvantages (well,
>> object oriented code tends to get voluminous and slow, maybe even buggy,
>> at least that is the common perception).
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming
>>
>> Gnome and KDE both use object oriented models for their desktops, where
>> KDE also uses an object oriented language, while GNOME works more with
>> procedural languages (C) and its own object management code.
>>
>> Btw, for LXDE, I would, independent of that question, opt for using
>> anything that is stable, small (in the total resources footprint) and
>> fast, even if it means less features. I like C, even that it means you
>> have to be extra careful about memory management and pointer
>> arithmetics.
>>
>> One of the "major features" of LXDE for me was always that it needs less
>> than 5 seconds to start up all necessary components (lxpanel, pcmanfm,
>> window manager), instead of initializing a lot of services before you
>> can do actual work on the desktop. I hope that the new versions of
>> lxpanel and pcmanfm will still be similarly efficient, no matter which
>> model or toolkit you will use.
>>
>> Regards
>> -Klaus
>>
>
>
> --
> ------------------------------
> University of Informatic Sciences (UCI) http://www.uci.cu*
> *Nova Light Development Team  http://www.nova.cu
> Alexis López Zubieta   azubieta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
>   <http://www.antiterroristas.cu/>
>
>