D-Bus

[Max Wiehle <mwiehle2 ix urz uni-heidelberg de>]

Hey,

I was chatting with ackley yesterday about beagle in #dashboard. Maybe i
just copy & paste... 

ackley: i like the idea of a dbus interface to indexers as well, as it
splits the ui from the backend
max: Right - we'd just need a standart interface so you can plug in
beagle or tracker or whatever and use all the integrated stuff.
max: this one: http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/6883.html really
impressed me some days ago.
max: Technically beagle can do the same. But maintaining two different
inclusions will be a pita.
max: Would be so cool to have a common dbus interface so whatever app
feels like including search or metadata capabilities can use that
interface instead of a specific implementation.
ackley: i completely agree
ackley: the tracker integration samples are really impressive
ackley: if their were a dbus api these integrations could be
standardized, and the backend could win on it's own merits, and the
integrations on their own
max: definitly.
max: I don't think it's that hard to do either.
max: afaik they both use D-Bus anyway.
bhale: beagle hasnt used dbus in over a year
max: ups.
[...]
ackley: why not?
bhale: because when beagle started dbus was very unstable api-wise
bhale: and also not able to handle the massive flood of data

So. I feel there would be quite some need for a standart interface to
search and metadata engines (be they beagle or tracker or whatever) so
there would not be a need to reproduce all the nice integration stuff. 
I think dbus would fit quite well in there because afaik it's now quite
stable and independent of programming languages etc.

Are there any plans for that? I'd really love to see more stuff like the
example above with beagle or for that matter beagle integration used for
tracker. I think both engines have their strength and weaknesses and
interesting different approaches. So from a users point of view i'd like
to be able to choose my search backend without worrying about desktop
integration. 

Maybe that could be something for SoC as well...

What do you think?
 Max