Does anybody know how to use Bonobo?

Apart from those lovely guys at Ximian, does anybody have a clue as to how it works? Last night, after coding up a Perl XML-RPC server to display the current song being played by Xmms (yes, I’m getting back into geek mode ready for university), I suddenly had the great idea of embedding the GtkHtml editor into my simple Python blogging tool, just like how Evolution uses it for reading/writing mail. I’ll just look up a few examples of Bonobo usage in Python, and I’ll get a HTML editor for no effort.

You can stop laughing now.

After three hours, a conversation on irc.gnome.org, and extensive trawling through Google, I managed to find an example that created a GtkHTML editor window. And did nothing else. The core Bonobo documentation is terse to the point of being unreadable, and the scant few developer articles online focus on extremely light-weight controls, rather than talking about things that are actually useful. I eventually gave up and went to bed. It shouldn’t really be that hard. Ideally, it should be extremely easy to write GNOME applications in a high-level language like Python (incidentally, I’m singling out GNOME mainly because it’s what I’m most familiar with - KDE might be better), which can access all areas of the desktop environment, from simple buttons to the more complex features such as html widgets and Bonobo components. For all the knocking that Visual Basic receives, it allows almost complete access to the Windows system, and has reams of fantastic documentation. I know that the GNOME Project doesn’t have the same sort of resources, but it would be nice for them not to treat non-C programmers as third-class citizens. Maybe GNOME 2 will change all this. I hope it does.

I found LIDN on my travels. It’s a start (although for some reason the Bonobo link goes to a CVS book - which seemed to sum up my experience of the last 24 hours quite well), although still heavily C-orientated. Again, it’s frustrating, as GNOME 2 sounds like it’s got some wonderful features (e.g. the Gnome-VFS system, which allows transparent writing to WebDAV systems), but I don’t want to have to go through all the wheel-rebuilding that C involves just to write a simple program…

Okay, rant over.