OK, this year we feel it is the time to make “big” changes in ATK. The world was different when the first version of ATK is designed: not so many toolkits needed to be considered. Now we have Gtk+, Gecko, WebKit, Clutter and even Qt. It is normal that two or more toolkits are co-existed in one application. Plus, we are using D-Bus as IPC, this makes the information which is transferred between processes more “precious” because D-Bus is somewhat slower than CORBA. So, let’s get together and discuss about it. It’s good to have people who work on many different toolkits, this make it possible for us to discuss the differences between the toolkits and get to conclusions (interfaces definition in ATK) which can make our life easier.
Thanks to API and Mario and other people from Igalia’s great organization work. Great place to have meeting, great lunch everyday, great dinner, and great city tour!
People filed bugs if they have something to propose on the hackfest. So basically, we went through all the bugs one by one during the hackfest. Here is the meta bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=638537. Many proposals fall into 3 categories: to make Orca get more clear and uniform information; to make at-spi2 transfer less information on D-Bus; to make ATK support multi-toolkits better. After 5 days discussion, we have conclusions on most of the proposals: http://live.gnome.org/Hackfests/ATK2011/Agenda. I think Joanie got many things she want :-), like tree row, and eliminating duplicated signals. Someway to reduce the round trip calls on D-Bus are considered. Also, AtkUtil needs to be modified to fit multi-toolkits environment. A simple way to fix the performance problem for gailtreeview jumped into my head, I still need to verify it. In summary, it is a successful meeting, many conclusions and some new ideas popped up. But the most important thing is: someone need to implement them in the future.
After the discussion, people put their name after the proposals if they want to work on them. I truly hope we can archive these proposals asap.
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