FOSSwire

We’ve all heard the rants: Mono has patents, Microsoft releases community promise, community ignores, flamewars continue. Enough to make any developer want to stop programming out of sheer annoyance. Mono is an excellent language and platform; there’s nothing anybody can do to change that. People will continue to develop C# apps, and those that continue to hate Mono will continue to complain.

There was always one thing about Mono/C# that I wondered: why does it have to use a JIT or a runtime? It seems like the sort of language that you could just compile and forget about. Perhaps I was a little naïve; Mono provides a lot of benefits like managed memory.

And then here comes Vala. Saunters into the room like it owns the place. Claims to be that magical language that translates C#-ish code to C with a little help from GLib and GObject. What?! Skeptical, over the past couple of months I decided to give this fancy language a try.

And I am left stunned. Vala code is very easy to write, and compiles without a complaint. It feels a lot like C#. Being a Python programmer, actually writing in this language felt really new, yet somehow familiar. Time to summarize!

The Good

It’s a runtime without a runtime. Vala, true to its word, converts the source to C and compiles it. Memory and variables are all managed using GObject. Opened files and resources are closed automatically. Less and less do I have to worry about a leaky application. Sure, it requires the GLib library, but that is almost as ubiquitous as the standard C library on free software desktops.

The bindings! This is the real sweet spot. Since Vala code appears as C to the target machine, that means that almost all existing libraries can be made compatible. Vala bindings can be as simple as a single file. 200 lines is all it takes to bind to WebKit. On top of that, it was automatically generated! Thanks to GObject introspection, bindings for many GObject-based libraries can be entirely automatic. That’s smart.

It has nice error messages, unlike GCC. This alone might be a compelling reason to switch. ;-)

The bad

There are cases when Vala doesn’t quite hit the target. Granted, it’s still under active development and hasn’t hit a 1.0 release yet. While it is pretty good at catching potential programming issues, there are cases where some errors might slip by and you are left with debugging C source. This is mostly when you have a stray reference or unowned variable that goes berserk.

Speaking of C sources… they aren’t very pretty. _tmp_ variables are thrown all over the place, and the memory management code seems to take up a bulk of the source.

If you’re looking for documentation on Vala, well… you might be looking for a while. There is a constantly updated tutorial and a plethora of examples, but I wasn’t able to find anything that really went in-depth. Installing Devhelp and looking through C documentation helped out. The fact that the bindings’ VAPIs are fairly readable makes them a good place to look for function definitions, but explanations might be hard to find. If you’ve a C# or Mono programmer, Vala shouldn’t be much of an issue. Someone like myself who hasn’t worked with a C#-like language might be baffled for a few moments understanding how things work. Again, since Vala is constantly changing, it could be difficult to keep documentation up-to-date. But it would certainly be a nice thing to have.

All in all, Vala is a pretty sweet language. If you’ve ever had an interest in C#, I highly suggest you check it out.

Keeping organised can be tough sometimes and there are lots of different applications and tools designed to help you get organised.

Tasque is designed to be a very simple todo list application, designed specifically to link in with popular online todo service Remember The Milk.

It is written in C#/Mono, so you will need all the relevant Mono gubbins already installed to get it up and running. Here on Fedora 8, there isn't a package yet, so I'll run you through how to install it from source.

First of all, head to the Tasque download page and download the archive in whichever format you want. Once you've got it, extract it somewhere, then open a terminal in that directory.

It's a fairly standard compilation process:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install # as root

Once that's done, it should show up under Office in your GNOME Applications menu. As soon as you load it up, you'll be given the option to integrate directly with Remember The Milk.

Clicking the Authorise button whisks you away to the RTM site, where you enter your username and password on the site itself and then allow API access for Tasque. Once you've done that, and clicked the button back in the app, your todo list syncs directly from the service.

By default, all your future tasks show up in the main window all together, but you can use the selection box at the top left to filter between what would appear as your different tabs in RTM.

In a similar vein, adding a task just by clicking the big button adds it directly to your RTM inbox, but again you can select which category to add it to using the arrow.

Once you've set up a task, you can then add more information such as a due date and notes. I found the due date interface to not work very well or very intuitively, requiring me to hold down the mouse on the - column to select a date from a pop-up list.

Tasque still is in its early days, and there are no official 'stable releases' yet, so this behaviour might be improved in future.

The syncing between RTM and Tasque as a desktop client works well. Any changes you make are synchronised almost instantly. My only concern on the reliance on the service is that Tasque appears to have no offline mode or cache of your tasks - i.e. at launch time you must have a connection to RTM or the application ceases to be of use.

Nevertheless, from what I've seen, Tasque is a simple approach to making Remember The Milk integrate well with the GNOME desktop, and despite some teething troubles is a must for any GNOME and RTM user.