Google Summer of Code 06 - A Simplified Onscreen Keyboard

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El mié, 10-05-2006 a las 17:08 +0100, Henrik Nilsen Omma escribió:
> I'm interested in brainstorming a bit more about the C/C++ core with a 
> python wrapper approach. If this is indeed workable (my knowledge of 
> python is limited, so I don't know how C extensions are handled), it 
> might also save some work because the AT-SPI code could then be fished 
> out from GOK.
> 
> AFAICT, the parts of GOK that talk to AT-SPI work just fine, and the 
> problems are in the user interface, which we would in any case replace.
> 

Well, the design proposed from Jack looks good, but I think that it is
only useful if we reuse those parts of GOK that talk to AT-SPI. The
"need for speed" it's not critical in this application, and Python
responds well and fast to the keypresses (just take a look around some
of the python games out there).

If we take this approach we should make clear which parts will be our
"core" and which ones will be implemented in Python. If we use a X
library for Python, we could handle the keys and messages from the X
server without reinventing the wheel and having that already implemented
in C. 

Again, the Cairo option leaves us with a higher level API than X lib for
drawing, it's mature in Python and allows to do more graphic work easily
and it can be used apart from GTK, which allows to get
desktop-independancy. Also, Cairo is very scalable so it could work from
an XGL server to a small PDA with much less work. The only drawback it's
that we should stick to X lib for key management, but I think that Cairo
is more programmer friendly for graphics than X Lib.

As you can see, with those libs and the work made from the folks of GOK
(an adding to it), we have much of the Core C/C++ work made for us, so
we could have much more time to think about the main app, in Python.

> I also like the idea of not locking ourselves to the GOK keyboard file 
> format, but do a one-time conversion. That would also give us a chance 
> to automatically remove data we don't need, like the numeric keypad and 
> function keys. The reason we need to do this at all is that GOK has 
> literally hundreds of existing layouts.

I'm with you in this one, we could switch away sooner or later from the
GOK ideas and go in our own way of redefining what an onscreen keyboard
we will do. Not only being desktop-independent, but doing something
really useful for the impaired. 

> - Henrik
> 
> 
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