14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME developers are dreaming big, and they want to make users create and distribute applications that work on multiple distributions. Now, the official GNOME SDK runtime is out, and it should help a lot in this regard.
One of the goals of the GNOME team is to provide the user with apps that can be deployed in multiple distributions and environments. This is a lofty goal and hard one, and it's still pretty far away into the future, but a first step is to have an SDK ready to do this. Now that the Official GNOME SDK runtime is out, we should see some progress in this regard.
Sandboxed applications are not something new, and Canonical is already using this concept for its Ubuntu Touch platform. The fact that apps are completely sandboxed is the main reason publishing apps on the mobile platform can be done in a matter of minutes. Everything is much safer for the user, and in theory, it should make it much easier to install the apps on other platforms as well.
The GNOME SDK is still young
The developer Alexander Larsson explained that this is still early work and that it's just a developer preview that will get weekly updates. As you can imagine, this is built for GNOME 3.16, so it won't work for older versions.
"As people who have followed the work on sandboxed applications know, we have promised a developer preview for GNOME 3.16. Well, 3.16 has now been released, so the time is now! I spent last week setting up an build system on the GNOME infrastructure, and the output of this is finally available at http://sdk.gnome.org/repo/" wrote Alexander Larsson.
The developer has also posted a very handy tutorial in his blog post which goes into much greater detail. In any case, some very exciting times are coming, and GNOME is definitely riding the wave.