Re: Scripting in Gnome

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

jamie wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 15:00, Bill Haneman wrote:
>  
>
> > jamie wrote:...
> >
> >    
> >
> > > Because Bonobo is equivalent in functionality to COM, I was kinda hoping
> > > a future version of Bonobo would be independent of corba or whatever
> > > underlying mechanism is used so you could use whatever system works best
> > > (obviously everyone will use the fastest and most efficient method
> > > whilst keeping Corba for backwards compatibility). I think there's an
> > > overwhelming case for replacing corba IDL with XML in bonobo if thats
> > > done (XSLT for automatic language bindings would be very handy).
> > >
> > >      
> > No no no please; the IDL should be the 'normative' definition for 
> > interfaces.  That's what it was invented for; the fact that we are using 
> > "CORBA IDL" is less significant than the fact we're using IDL.  The IDL 
> > can be compiled to various backends, it doesn't have to be compiled to 
> > CORBA stubs/skels.
> >
> >    
>
> I was thinking along the lines of having XML as the high level
> definition. That could then be translated via XSLT to IDL if you needed
> it. I'm not saying scrap corba completely cause we do need it for
> backwards comatibility. If you look at the way MS is heading - its
> effectively using xml and web services to replace IDL in .Net

That doesn't make it a good idea ;-)

Making the XML the 'high level' definition stands the whole business on 
its head.  IDL was designed to express interfaces, XML is a very poor 
fit for this.  The fact that it would junk existing GNOME service 
definitions is the real stopper though, IMO.

Also - XSLT is powerful, but not all-powerful.  Some things are very 
hard to express via XSLT transformations.  Lastly, IDL is very human 
readable, which XML is most certainly not (at least, nontrivial XML 
interface definitions are not!).

- Bill

> jamie.