Unofficial wiki for Cinnamon developers

[dalcde]

I've created an unofficial documentation for the libraries used in Cinnamon for developers as a reference (has someone already done this before?). Little is created so everyone can help editing.

http://cinnamondocumentation.wikinet.org/wiki/Main_Page

EDIT: Added a half-complete tutorial

[bimsebasse]

Brilliant! Wish I knew enough about javascript to contribute.

[dalcde]

Added a half-complete tutorial

[xenopeek]

Looks good.

Stickied.

[mojosmail2003]

This is a great idea thanks. I find that the learning curve for developing is somewhat steep, so any documentation would be greatly appreciated. Would it make sense with some sort of uml-diagram showing the relationship between the various classes and files? I haven't programmed in javascript before, so maybe this wouldn't make sense.

[dalcde]

This is a great idea thanks. I find that the learning curve for developing is somewhat steep, so any documentation would be greatly appreciated. Would it make sense with some sort of uml-diagram showing the relationship between the various classes and files? I haven't programmed in javascript before, so maybe this wouldn't make sense.

Yes I did that for some of the classes, such as Applet and PopupMenu. It is located at the top of the page.

btw, javascript is easy to learn (compared to languages such as C).

[mojosmail2003]

This is a great idea thanks. I find that the learning curve for developing is somewhat steep, so any documentation would be greatly appreciated. Would it make sense with some sort of uml-diagram showing the relationship between the various classes and files? I haven't programmed in javascript before, so maybe this wouldn't make sense.

Yes I did that for some of the classes, such as Applet and PopupMenu. It is located at the top of the page.

btw, javascript is easy to learn (compared to languages such as C).

Thanks, I have previously programmed in C and Java, so the language part should be manageable. The difficult part for me is probably to know where Gnome stops and Cinnamon takes over, and the relation of the ~600 files in the source code and the general folder structure. Some information on compiling/installing would be greatly appreciated as well (not sure if the previous forum discussion on compiling are valid for the 1.4 version as well).

Btw. it might make sense to only to allow "users" to edit the wiki (see recent changes for today 19th of March).

EDIT: Just read through the Applet tutorial, and thinks does make a lot more sense now

[dalcde]

Btw. it might make sense to only to allow "users" to edit the wiki (see recent changes for today 19th of March).

Well, allowing ANYONE to edit it makes it more convinient for people to edit. Users making unrelated edits are unaviodable in wikis.

[grumpypenguin]

I have a question here. Is JavaScript really a good choice for developing a desktop and its extensions? Because JavaScript was never a speed demon and Gnome 3 itself isn't exactly fast, especially on older machines.

[dalcde]

Only Javascript is available for coding applets/extensions, unless you somehow link them together it some complicated way. For example, the GNOME Menu by bownz used to be ported from Python and had Python code in it. But it integrates poorly with the theme (it's now rewritten in JS), so I'd advice you to stick with Javascript.

[mbokil]

I think the wiki is a great idea. I was looking around for documentation and I found older Gnome shell stuff. It would be helpful to post code examples of all the applet controls/methods. I get a lot of information about what methods are possible reading Gnome devs documents: http://developer.gnome.org/platform-overview/stable/

Nice work on the wiki.

[teatime]

Thank you for the tutorial but maybe I can suggest to offer a download link for both listings.

[nabsha]

Hi All,

Just wanted to raise that this is not opening for me!!!, Actually I am not able to access wikinet.org at all. Anyone else having the same issue?

[eanfrid]

wikinet.org exists but

Code: Select all

host -a cinnamondocumentation.wikinet.org
Trying "cinnamondocumentation.wikinet.org"
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached


is a non existent host Maybe a misconfigured NS or the host has been removed from there.

[nabsha]

Does this mean we have lost the only source of info for Cinnamon Devs?

[prisma]

I would like to be a bit more positive, but this was posted in march, and as off today, it has about 10 pages of content, most of them rather short.

I would like to pick up extension development, but there is simply no documentation. Why does this situation persists? Linux mint is probably the most popular distribution, there are millions of users. One would assume community contributed code is much needed. Cinamon still lacks a zillion bells and whistles that gnome2 had.

Please, whomever is in a position to do so, give us some docs.

The most accessible document is the applet tutorial, but heck, I don't even know how to set up a proper development environment.

[dyrer]

Excellent work
Everyone's work to help other new linux users (like me), are welcome

[Matt-from-Belgium]

I'm struggling with the same problem. I have quite a bit of experience in web developing using JavaScript so the syntax shouldn't be a problem. But since all the classes used are custom there's just no way that I can create something good.

I have building blocks, but I don't know what they do. I really need documentation on all the possible imports and what they do and how they do it.

Matt.

[catweazel]

Great work. For the front page I would make one suggestion, which is to include a sentence that tells what the information is useful for, e.g.:

This is the unofficial documentation for the JavaScript and C libraries (via Gjs) that can be used in Cinnamon to create applets.

Cheers.