Friday report on Beagle+Xesam (a bit delayed)

["Arun Raghavan" <arunissatan gmail com>]

Hello All,
Here's a small report on what I've been upto so far on my Summer of Code
project.

Instead of spending a lot of time reading up on everything I need to, I decided
to jump into the code a bit first -- I've implemented the beginning of the
Xesam DBus interface [1]. I now have a little program that registers itself as
a Xesam "searcher", and clients can connect and set up a session and pass
searches. I've still got to do something meaningful with the searches, though.
I didn't have to write a test client, since Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen has
already hacked up a nice one [2].

[1] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/XesamSearchLive
[2] http://www.grillbar.org/xesam-tools/xesam-tools-0.2.0.tar.gz

The first hiccup I ran into was returning "variant" objects through C# on DBus
(which is required for the GetProperty() call). Joe pointed out that I was
using the old, unmaintained dbus-sharp bindings that used to be shipped with
dbus, rather than Alp Toker's newer "managed" DBus bindings [3].

[3] http://www.ndesk.org/DBusSharp

So what I need to do from this point on (other than brushing up my C#) is:

1) Write a parser for Xesam queries (in XML) [4]
2) Implement a layer that does the translation between Xesam and Beagle
(this will need to be done incrementally)
3) Plug in layer from (2) into the Xesam interface

[4] http://freedesktop.org/wiki/XesamQueryLanguage

(1) is pretty much independent of (2) and (3), so I can focus on one
of these at a
time. I've started on (2) and (3) first -- I'm currently figuring out how to
use the BeagleClient interface to talk to beagled.

Cheers.
--
Arun Raghavan
(http://nemesis.accosted.net)
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