Cenatic, Spain's national resource centre on open source, is offering on-line courses for development of desktop applications, it announced on 26 August. The courses are meant to help new developers to write software for two of the most-used open source desktop environments, Gnome and KDE.
The first eight pilot modules are available on the Cenatic Desktop SL website.
"There are many tutorials and manuals available on the Internet, yet there is a lack of comprehensive training for these two important projects", the resource centre quotes Alvaro del Castillo, head of its training department.
Applications that will be developed during the course can easily be translated into different languages. They are intended to be able to operate in several desktop environments and will be published as open source. The resource centre hopes this will encourage open source developers to participate in collaborative projects.
The centre believes that the training efforts will help to ensure the future development of the open source desktops and improve its competitiveness against other alternatives.
Development training will also help to create communities around projects started by Cenatic itself, for instance on the further development of Cenatic's mobile ODF viewer.
Cenatic says the importance of open source desktop applications is growing, used on millions of computers worldwide. "They are the ideal alternative for the government, an efficient way to help small and medium sized enterprises strengthen their own technological development and it provides home users with software at minimal cost."
"The developer communities are the key to the continuity of projects", says Del Castillo in the Cenatic statement. "Encouraging its growth is to encourage the development of open source software."
More information:
Community for development of desktop applications