Hey hey, I wrote a tiny app in Gjs yesterday and wanted to share my experience. It's a wrapper around the Spotify web player to add support for media keys (play/pause, next, previous). It uses Gtk, WebKitGTK+ 2, and DBus.
I started with the gnome-devel-demos [1], which gives a very nice introduction. The hello world was running quickly and the edit/run cycle is of course very fast due to not needing compilation. For adding media key support, I looked at what totem does [2], and tried to reproduce it. This is where I hit the first road block, there's no API reference for JS on developer.gnome.org. But I think this should be addressed with bug 693378. Through searching I found some documentation which helped [4] (although some things didn't work as documented). For the WebKitGTK+ API, I looked at the C API reference and puzzled it out. This was also kind of hard, but it's the same problem as above. For making it easy to install this, I experimented with a .desktop file which references the .js and icon through relative paths, but had no success. I resorted to having an install.sh that expands the paths and copies the file to ~/.local/share/applications/. I'm eagerly awaiting the "app bundles" work, which should improve the situation [5]. All in all, I think the GNOME platform is moving in the right direction and there's potential in having a good app development story. Finally, here's the link to the source, if anyone is interested: https://github.com/robinst/spotty-gnome Regards, Robin [1] https://developer.gnome.org/gnome-devel-demos/unstable/js.html [2] https://git.gnome.org/browse/totem/tree/src/plugins/media-player-keys [3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=693378 [4] http://www.roojs.com/seed/gir-1.2-gtk-3.0/gjs/Gio.DBusProxy.html [5] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-os-list/2012-September/msg00000.html _______________________________________________ gnome-devel-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-devel-list
