> Tracker 0.7 ships with a DBus API, Nepomuk as ontology, SPARQL as query > language, SPARQL UPDATE for inserting and updating data and finally > signals-per-classes as life search capability. > > The DBus APIs are simple but very powerful thanks to SPARQL.
>From looking at tracker again this weekend, and indeed it does work better than the last time I checked in June (modulo some apparent big bugs and some issues with the concept that I couldn't test due to the bugs) but from a application developer point of view, I'm still disappointed. Essentially, I feel the APIs are far too low level and the documentation is very very incomplete, which ended up leaving me wandering around in dark as to what I was meant to do. The Application Development Manual is useless (I know its not finished, but its no help at all). I know you guys love love love ontolgoies and SPARQL and predicates and all that, but honestly, as an application developer I couldn't care less. All I want is to get at the data I want in the easiest possible way, and looking at tracker and discovering that I need to learn yet another language and a whole new load of boring concepts to do that is very offputting. SPARQL, tuples, ontologies should be internal details that you shouldn't need to know about. Looking at tracker/src I see 7 things begining with libtracker- and none of them look overly helpful. The most useful looks like libtracker-client, but again its too low level. What I would really like to see is some simpler high level calls that enable me to get all data of (for example) Music, allow me to specify what fields I want, and it should be a GObject that I can connect to signals on to find out when a result has been added/removed/changed. We should be looking to make our APIs as simple and easy to use as possible to enable developers to make the applications without distracting them with irrelevant implementation details. If this already exists, I apologise and blame the lack of documentation. iain _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
