Portland Project hits 1.0 milestone

The Portland Project has officially released Portland 1.0, a software framework designed to facilitate interoperability and simplify development of desktop Linux software by giving developers a common set of Linux Desktop Interfaces and tools to enable applications under development to easily integrate into both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments. This significant first release has met with relative enthusiasm from open source software development companies and Linux distributors. Already available in Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, Portland 1.0 is also expected to appear in upcoming releases of Red Flag and Xandros.

Software toolkit developer Trolltech included Portland 1.0 support in Qt 4.2, which it released earlier this month. Trolltech comments, "[Qt 4.2] arrives on the heels of the GNOME 2.16 final release and for the first time, both versions are designed to be more tightly integrated. The tighter integration in Qt 4.2 and GNOME 2.16 is the result of The Portland Project, a working group dedicated to better interoperability between KDE and GNOME in order to establish a greater presence for Linux in the desktop market."

Portland primarily consists of a development API and command-line tools that provide consistent access to basic underlying system functionality. Prior to Portland, there was no universally accepted method for adding applications to system menus, sending an e-mail with the user's default mail client, or opening a file with the user's preferred application. All of those things were handled by a disparate assortment of libraries specific to individual desktop environments. The first release of Portland well enable independent software developers to perform those tasks using a standard set of command-line tools that is compatible with both of the major Linux desktop environments. The Portland Project is based on open standards, and actively encourages other lightweight desktop environments to provide Portland support as well.

Although the Portland Project has received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from software companies, some individual developers are concerned that the nature of the project is being misrepresented. Given the numerous misconceptions about the exact scope of the project, I think that those concerns are warranted. We noticed this trend very early in Portland's existence, and tried to diminish the confusion by providing a detailed technical overview in our initial coverage.

As a result of the ambiguity of the word "interface" in the press releases and poor coverage from news sites with less of a technical emphasis, some people are erroneously convinced that Portland is a complete GUI development toolkit that wraps both GNOME and KDE. Portland is not an end-to-end solution for porting software to Linux, it is lightweight compatibility framework that provides a programmatic developer interface (not a graphical interface) for accessing basic services handled by existing desktop environments.

Despite OSDL's unfortunate inability to adequately convey the nature of the technology, Project Portland has a lot of potential, and it is promising to see it being adopted by so many distributors. Hopefully OSDL will put a lid on the hyperbole and help clear up some of the misconceptions.