Re: Proposal and RFC: DAL, the Desktop Abstraction Layer

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Ikke wrote:
> Hi Gnome desktop hackers,
>
> This morning I sent an email[1] to the XDG list at freedesktop.org,
> explaining some new idea I got and I'd like to hack on.
>
> I'd like to hear your thoughts on this too, as it won't be very useful
> to write something like this if nobody is going to use it.
>
> Please express your opinion :-)

Excellent stuff - I too had been thinking along those lines though mine 
was more influenced by application profiles like you get in bluetooth.

Profiles define a common api (set of methods and events) such that any 
app implementing that profile can manipulate it without knowing anything 
else about it (IE theres no need to introspect the methods/events).

Profiles come as both public (pre-defined) and private (for propriety 
extensions). The idea is that any app can implement any number of 
public or private profiles which are defined by some XML based spec. It 
would be easy to implement this using DBus as you have suggested.

This is great for implementing things like interfacing with an email 
app. Its currently not very nice to open an email client and prefill its 
contents (with some clients you can pass it as command line parameters 
others like Evolution require the use of some nasty corba etc). If there 
was an email profile which email clients used then regardless of what 
email client was installed I would be able to use it in the same way. 
Now if what you are saying is DAL is pretty much the same thing as this 
then yes that would be cool to implement.


jamie.

> Kind regards,
>
> Ikke                                            http://www.eikke.com
>
> PS I hope this is the correct list to post an email regarding a topic
> like this to. If not, please point me at the right direction.
>
> [1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2005-January/005687.html
>
>
>
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