Anwari - GNOME 3 Application Development Beginners Guide

Mohammad Anwari is a software hacker from Indonesia with more than 13 years of experience in software development. He has been working with Linux-based systems, applications in GNOME, and Qt platforms. The projects he has worked on range from the development of constrained devices and desktop applications, to high traffic server systems and applications.

He worked for his own startup company during the dotcom era before moving to Finland to work for Nokia/MeeGo. Now he's back in Indonesia, regaining his entrepreneurship by establishing a new startup company that focuses on Node.js and Linux-based projects. In his free time, he serves as an executive director for BlankOn, one of the biggest open source projects in Indonesia.

In the past, he has published a couple of books on Linux in the Indonesian language.

This book would have been impossible to write without the great and continuous support from my family: Rini, Alif, and Abil.

Dhi Aurrahman is a Project Manager at Labtek Indie, where he leads the development of custom-tailored interactive applications for various installations and platforms. Prior to this, he worked on various projects based on real-time computer vision systems with Samsung Electronics in South Korea. He has proven skills in C++ programming; application development using Qt for various platforms, including desktop and mobile; and JavaScript programming. Dhi has done his B.Sc in Computational Physics from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia, and his M.Eng in Computer Engineering, focused on computer vision and machine learning, from Chonnam National University, South Korea.

Joaquim Rocha is a Portuguese software developer with an M.Sc. degree in Computer Science. He has over six years of experience in developing graphical user interfaces and has been involved in a number of Free Software projects.

He is also a member of the GNOME Foundation and is the author of the most complete OCR application, OCRFeeder, which was developed for the GNOME desktop.

As part of his work for the Free Software consultancy Igalia, Joaquim has created the world's first Free Software skeleton-tracking library, completely written with GNOME technologies.

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Preface

This book is about developing GNOME 3 applications with the Vala and JavaScript programming languages. It guides you to build GTK+, Clutter, and HTML5 applications on the GNOME 3 platform. It covers GNOME 3 specific subsystems such as data access, multimedia, networking, and filesystem. It also covers good software engineering practices such as localization and testing.

What this book covers

, Installing GNOME 3 and SDK , discusses installing GNOME 3 and the Software Development Kit in some popular Linux distributions.

, Preparing Our Weapons , talks about the basic usage of the Integrated Development Environment and User Interface Designer used in this book: Anjuta and Glade. This chapter also touches on the development reference tool Devhelp.

, Programming Languages , covers the basics of Vala and programming JavaScript with Seed. This chapter will be the foundation to understand the following chapters if you are yet not familiar with Vala and JavaScript.

, Using GNOME Core Libraries , guides you to exploit the commonly used features of the GNOME core libraries.

, Building Graphical User Interface Applications explains the steps of building GUI applications with GTK+ and Clutter.

, Creating Widgets , explains how to create GTK+ widgets from scratch. This chapter also talks about extending and customizing widgets.

, Having Fun with Multimedia , contains lots of information on GStreamer. It covers both playing multimedia stream and applying filters to the stream.

, Playing with Data , explains presenting data with the TreeView API family. While showing the data presentation, it also talks about getting data from Evolution Data Server.