Builder — a new IDE specifically for GNOME app developers

One of the many interesting things covered in Jiří’s coverage of this years GUADEC was GNOME Builder — an IDE that will focus purely on GNOME applications, with a goal of making it “Dead Simple”. Jiří’s post about day 4 at GUADEC covers the content of Christian Hergert’s talk about Builder (including him announcing the brave step of quitting his day job to work on it). While there are other IDEs in Fedora (like Adjuta and Eclipse) that can be used for development on the GTK+GNOME stack, none of these are focused purely on development of this type.

one of the GNOME Builder mockups

A quick look at the mockups for GNOME Builder show that this IDE appears to be following the GNOME3 HIG fairly closely, with a fairly minimal interface. However, the plans for the IDE do include a wide range of features that will make the creation of GNOME-centric applications a lot easier to develop. Such features include: integration with the built-in GNOME DevHelp, the ability to easily add DBus and Gsettings into applications, git integration, and the ability to debug and profile your application with Perfkit and Nemiver.

Even with a fairly ambitious list of proposed features, the developers of GNOME Builder have also defined what it won’t be — it won’t be for developing applications for anything other than GNOME3. It also won’t have features that will be tailored for the developers of the low-level toolkits like GTK+ itself, it’s purely for the development of applications that use them. It also won’t be for programming languages that don’t have strong support for GObjectIntrospection. Never fear though, most of the languages that you want to write GTK apps in already have strong introspection support, like: C, Vala, JavaScript, or Python (among others).

There is also a prototype version of GNOME Builder available on github if you want to try to build it and see how the early prototypes of this tool are looking.