MeeGo applauncherd: faster application startup and more

[Alberto Mardegan]

Hi all!
   I'm sending this message both to ubuntu-devel and ubuntu-phone, in 
the hope of reaching the widest interested audience as possible. 
However, please reply to ubuntu-devel only.

I want to bring to your attention the existence of a project which IMHO 
would be very beneficial to Ubuntu (especially on embedded devices, but 
not only): the application launcher originally developed for Maemo/MeeGo.

In short, the main features that applauncherd bring to the system are:
  * faster application startup
  * support for single instance applications
  * splash screen while the application is starting up

The recommended readings are these:
   http://apidocs.meego.com/1.0/mtf/launcher.html
   http://goo.gl/DjGCV

In order to be used in Ubuntu, the software itself needs some porting, 
to remove the dependencies to Qt4, X11, and the AEGIS security framework 
used in MeeGo. Luckily though, these changes have already been made by 
the Mer people, who ported the software to Qt5, removed the AEGIS stuff 
and also simplified a bit the architecture (there isn't an applauncherd 
daemon any more, but the invoked directly talks to the booster 
processes). They also wrote a booster for speeding up the startup of 
applications using QML components, and we could easily modify that to 
use our Ubuntu SDK components instead.

Their code is here:
   https://github.com/nemomobile/mapplauncherd
   https://github.com/nemomobile/mapplauncherd-qt
   https://github.com/nemomobile/mapplauncherd-booster-qtcomponents

Please let me know what you think of this. IMHO it's a simple and 
brilliant idea, it could be integrated with apparmor and also be used to 
provide sane default callbacks for handling the application lifetime 
state changes.

I've never been directly involved in this project, but given how much I 
dislike NIH, I'd be happy to collaborate with whoever wants to bring 
this to Ubuntu.

Ciao,
   Alberto