Bonobo is an obsolete component framework for the

GNOME A gnome is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, first introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and later adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature. Its characte ...

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 graphica ...

. Bonobo is designed to create reusable software components and

compound document In computing, a compound document is a document that “combines multiple document formats, either by reference, by inclusion, or both.” Compound documents are often produced using word processing software, and may include text and non-text ele ...

s. Through its development history it resembles

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

'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 allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...

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

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

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 sys ...

(CORBA) or its GNOME implementation

ORBit In celestial mechanics, an orbit is the curved trajectory of an object such as the trajectory of a planet around a star, or of a natural satellite around a planet, or of an artificial satellite around an object or position in space such as a p ...

. Through Bonobo the functions of one application can be integrated into another: for example,

Gnumeric Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME Free Software Desktop Project. Gnumeric version 1.0 was released on 31 December 2001. Gnumeric is distributed as free software under the GNU General Public License; it is intended to r ...

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 cel ...

tables can be directly embedded into

AbiWord AbiWord () is a free and open-source software word processor. It is written in C++ and since version 3 it is based on GTK+ 3. The name "AbiWord" is derived from the root of the Spanish word "'' abierto''", meaning "open".Project MascoAbi the An ...

text document by including Gnumeric as Bonobo component. Available components are: *Gnumeric spreadsheet *ggv

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

viewer *

Xpdf Xpdf is a free and open-source PDF viewer for operating systems supported by the Qt toolkit. Versions prior to 4.00 were written for the X Window System and Motif. Functions Xpdf runs on nearly any Unix-like operating system. Binaries are a ...

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

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

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 sin ...

GNOME 2.22 Release Notes
/ref> 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 and open-source 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 proprie ...

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

References

External links

Bonobo
Bonobo site at Gnome

{{Software-stub Inter-process communication Application programming interfaces GNOME obsolete