RFC: LibAbi

Hi,

LibAbi is a pet project to create a gtk widget that provides AbiWord's
editing capabilities in a shared library. Instead of building my proof
of concept code with fjf's great plugin build system i hacked a
standalone version. It's a quick and dirty solution that statically
links all abi's .a files with the glue code and the test application.
For the moment this is enough for me to get on with coding, things
might improve after the 2.4 release because then i can change abi's
build system to use libtool for building a shared lib of the main
codebase as suggested by Dom.

Longer term plans (apart from building a .so) are
+ create a nice c api for the widget
+ create c bindings for the most important abiword classes so the
widget and auxiliary stuff can be used in gobject manner.

Blue sky plans (more like chances for other devs):
+ Eventually make the c bindings buildable as a plugin, so plugins have a c api
+ Eventually create language bindings of the gobjects
+ Eventually create a plugin loader for plugins written in the binding languages

Code: http://www.abisource.org/~rob/tmp/libabi.tgz
Patch to HEAD: http://www.abisource.org/~rob/repo/patches/abi-widget.diff

Build:
1) get abi HEAD into abiword/abi/
2) patch it
3) build gtk-only version in abiword/abi-gtk/
4) unzip libabi.tgz, you'll get abiword/libabi/
5) build it
6) run abiword/libabi/anthill/anthill

"anthill" is the test app for the binding. The name means "pile of
bugs" and is courtesy of fjf.

Right, the request:
It would be cool if you would allow this stuff into cvs as a peer
directory of abi/. Please fight out naming issues with uwog, i don't
care if it's called libabi, libabi-gtk or whatever.

Thanks for helpful comments,
- Rob
Received on Mon Jun 6 16:34:08 2005