gDesklets is a high-level, evolved engine for writing small desktop applets.Its leitmotiv summarizes it very well:


In this architecture you find many great things:

• Complete applet description using a in-house xml dialect, making it very fast to prototype applets.
  
• Scripting engine that knows about many things, and take care for you of many gory details.
  
• Certainly many more elements I just do not think about right now.
  

adesklets, although fitting in the same niche, took a very different approach to desklets writing:


Basically, it means that adesklets is significantly lighter, running with minimum resources usage and dependencies one a great variety of platforms. This low-levelness also come with high-level language independance (Python is ubiquitously used now, but only because other bindings are not completed yet), as the core adesklets program is a small command-line interpreter written entirely in C. This comes at the cost of developer-friendliness (well - this actually depend on the type of developper you are :-) ), but the extent of what you can do with it is generally considered broader.

So, If you are a gnome user (or you already have a significant part of gnome installed on your system), and if you are satisfied with gDesklets overall aspect and performance, then by all means stick by it; the two maintainers, Christian Meyer and Martin Grimme, are very committed to their software, and are constantly improving things - they are also friendly and helpful, and I kept a very good relationship with them so far.

If you are not or if you saw a desklet you would like to have, well maybe adesklets is worth a try.

Thanks for the question! Look at the documentation if you want more details. I also wrote recently a report in pdf about current state of gDesklets, just in case you want to know more...

Regards,