Re: ANNOUNCE: GNOME Speech API (GSAPI) - v0.6.0

[Rich Burridge <Rich Burridge Sun COM>]

Hi Havoc,

> > Because the initial version of GNOME Speech (v0.2.x) use a client/server
> > model (Bonobo/ORBit2). I've tried to abstract v0.6.0 so that if/when an
> > alternative comes along, then it will require minimal changes to the API.
> 
> When you say "an alternative" you mean an alternative to what?

To the underlying inter-process communication mechanism. One alternative
would be DBUS.

> Basically the IDL interface is going to be too hard to use from C
> without a C library wrapper. The extra lib dependencies for all of
> Bonobo will also limit your audience and limit our future flexibility.
> In short if your goal is wide usage in lots of apps I would go with
> something simpler.

As you know, GNOME currently uses a CORBA-based approach (Bonobo/ORBit2),
which relies on stub/skels definitions in IDL. To do an implementation 
for this, I don't believe I can define this API purely at the C level
(please correct me if I'm wrong). 

Are you suggesting we should not try to do a Bonobo/ORBit2 implementation
to show proof-of-concept, but use something else (DBUS for example)?

Note that we really do need a client/server model here to simplify
potential multi-process speech handling.

Whatever approach we pick will take quite a lot of effort, so picking the 
right horse to back now would be far better than trying to change horses 
in mid-steam.