many integrated development environments (IDEs) available that further simplify 

GUI programing:

KDevelop/QTDesigner for KDE/Qt

Anjuta/Glade for GNOME/GTK+

MonoDevelop for Mono/C#

Eclipse or NetBeans for Java/Swing/SWT

Desktop environments provide a much richer user environment than just simple 

window managers by providing standard productivity applications for: 

E mail and calendaring

Instant messaging

Image manipulation

Document editing and viewing

Scanning

CD/DVD burning, etc.

These applications are created with a standard GUI toolkit. They have a 

homogeneous look and feel, theme flexibility, inter application communication, 

drag and drop functionality, session management, and virtual desktop 

management. 

GNOME, KDE, and GNUStep go one step further by using not just simple GUI 

toolkits and window managers but providing a full component programming 

model. As you can see in Table 4 4, there are many different component models 

available on Linux.

Table 4 4   Different component models

Component model

Used by

XPCOM

Mozilla

UNO

OpenOffice

Bonobo

GNOME

KParts

KDE

Eclipse Plug in

Eclipse

Unification and standardization of the component model is a very difficult topic, 

but the applications can at least communicate with CORBA, XML RPC, SOAP, 

or DCOP, which makes desktop application integration possible. Fortunately 

most recent Linux development activity is beginning to standardize around the 

GNOME and KDE desktop environments (and their respective toolkits). Some 

traditional UNIX vendors are also beginning to adopt these environments. We 

will use and discuss KDE and GNOME in this book.

54 

Linux Client Migration Cookbook   A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux