Bonobo is an obsolete component framework for the

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

free

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphi ...

. Bonobo is designed to create reusable software components and compound documents. Through its development history it resembles

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

's OLE technology and is GNOME's equivalent of

KDE KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that enable collaborative work on its projects. Its products include the KDE Plasma gra ...

's KParts. Bonobo was developed as a solution to the problems and requirements of the

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

community in the development of complex applications. Bonobo is based on the

Common Object Request Broker Architecture The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a standard defined by the Object Management Group (OMG) designed to facilitate the communication of systems that are deployed on diverse platforms. CORBA enables collaboration between sy ...

(CORBA) or its GNOME implementation ORBit. Through Bonobo the functions of one application can be integrated into another: for example, Gnumeric

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

tables can be directly embedded into AbiWord text document by including Gnumeric as Bonobo component. Available components are: *Gnumeric spreadsheet *ggv

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

viewer * Xpdf

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

viewer *gill SVG viewer

History

Inspired by Microsoft's OLE, Bonobo was originally developed by

Ximian Ximian, Inc. (previously called Helix Code and originally named International Gnome Support) was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Miguel ...

for compound documents. Bonobo was included for the first time in Gnome 1.2 in May 2000. As of GNOME 2.4, Bonobo is officially considered obsolete, and developers are advised to switch to alternatives such as

D-Bus D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus") is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple Process (computing), processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org pro ...

or the GIO component of

GLib GLib is a bundle of three (formerly five) low-level system libraries written in C and developed mainly by GNOME. GLib's code was separated from GTK, so it can be used by software other than GNOME and has been developed in parallel ever since ...

instead. D-Bus replaced Bonobo as part of the Ridley project. Final results should be released in

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary s ...

3.0. Bonobo and ORBit libraries were removed from GNOME in version 2.22.

References

External links

Bonobo
Bonobo site at Gnome

{{free-software-stub Inter-process communication Application programming interfaces GNOME obsolete