Platform Team/Polyol

Summary

Intermediate level GObject based libraries stack.

Concepts

• Glucose - sugar core processes.

• Polyol - level that contains glucose compatibility libraries and libraries that are not tied to glucose directly (or not tied at all).
  The reason for such a level is that it will be deployed by 0install, e.g., it would be possible to have a recent Polyol stack on Sugar 0.82.
  • all libraries are written in Vala, i.e., based on pure GObjects, and could be used by non-python-based activities.
  • each Polyol component has its own release schedule, i.e., there are no Polyol official releases (it looks like in Gentoo)
  • glucose compatibility components will support several (popular among sugar deployers) sugar releases
  • except for the glucose compatibility components, all Polyol libraries are glucose independent.

• Activity - regular activities would not use glucose directly, rather they would only access glucose through the Polyol level.
  There is no need to code special activities, the sugar-toolkit API will be preserved, and activity developers will benefit because Polyol will support the recent sugar-toolkit API, e.g., they could use the new toolbars design even on Sugar 0.82.

Core libraries

All core libraries are C based and could contain bindings for various programming languages.

env

Access to various sugar environment settings.

shell

Compatibility level library to sugar-shell.

collab

High level client API for what activity developers might need to code collab activities.

storage

High level client API to sugar-datastore and local files system.

gui

A set of first level GUI widgets to simplify process of activity creation.

Programming language glue libraries

These are not C based but written in specific programming language libraries. They are glue level libraries that contain programming language specific code to start developing sugar activities. Libraries don't contain bindings for core, bindings are part of particular core library.

toolkit-python

Everything what developers need to start developing sugar activities in Python.