What's New for Developers

The following changes are important for developers using the GNOME 2.32 developer platform. If you're not interested in changes for developers, you can skip forward to Section 5 ― Internationalization.

As well as the GNOME Desktop, GNOME 2.32 is the latest release of the GNOME Developer Platform, a set of API- and ABI-stable libraries available under the GNU LGPL which can be used for the development of cross-platform applications.

Fixing Usage of Deprecated Libraries

Starting with GNOME 3.0, various deprecated parts of GNOME will be removed. These deprecated components include libraries such as libart_lgpl, libbonobo, libbonoboui, libglade, libgnome, libgnomecanvas, libgnomeprint, libgnomeprintui, libgnomeui, and libgnomevfs. For applications that ship as part of the GNOME Desktop, a number of cleanup tasks have been carried out to ensure no deprecated code is used. This will ensure a smooth transition to GNOME 3.0.

Developers are strongly urged to follow this example in their own applications too. Furthermore, for any developers (or potential developers) who wish to help us out, the GNOME goals wiki page lists the various tasks that are yet to be completed. An automatically created and updated status overview of remaining work for modules that are supported by the jhbuild build tool can be found here.

4.1. Glib 2.26

Glib 2.26 includes support for GSettings, the replacement for GConf as well as GDBus. A new date and time API is available in GDateTime. Glib also includes new support for dtrace and systemtap static markers; GObject property bindings, such as libexo; and proxy support for GSocket. Other improvements include new convenience macros to implement boxe and pointer types in G_DEFINE_[BOXED|POINTER]_TYPE and lastly, a new function g_object_notify_by_pspec which is faster than g_object_notify.

4.2. Anjuta

Anjuta, a full featured software development studio and IDE whose features include project management, an interactive debugger, a source editor, a version control GUI designer and more, has been updated with new functionality.

Python and Vala are now fully supported in Anjuta including calltips and auto-completion ("IntelliSense").

Anjuta's debugger now supports pretty-printing. When debugging, known objects are shown in a user friendly fashion, such as GObjects or C++-Classes. Lastly, the Symbol-Database has seen a major performance improvement.

4.3. Miscellaneous Developer Updates

Other updates in GNOME 2.32's development platform include the addition of libfolks, a library to support Empathy's metacontact functionality. In Devhelp it is now possible to disable specific books. The GTK+ roadmap has been updated and GTK+ 2.22 has added support for the latest accessor functions needed for developers to prepare their applications for GTK+ 3.0.