Re: Scripting in Gnome

[jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 15:40, James Henstridge wrote:

> >VBA is a dumbed down language and thats why its popular (because
> >non-programmers can make use of it) so naturally I would want any method
> >we use for automation in VBA to be similarily dumbed down and wrapping
> >it in an object fashion is the way VBA achieves that. Might have to wait
> >for D-Bus/DOM then for the automation part...
> >  
> >
> Are you sure that VBA is popular because it is "dumbed down"?  Languages 
> like Python have simpler and more regular syntax.  I would guess that 
> the reason it is popular is due to what it can be used for (ie. lots of 
> scriptable COM interfaces), and the fact that it has a builtin IDE in 
> the Office apps.

True but also cause there a lot of dummies book for it too. As a
programmer, I do prefer python to VBA because its more powerful but for
novice and non-programmers I tend to think basic and its less powerful
features as being a good starting point.

> Well, Bonobo is just a set of standard CORBA interfaces, along with some 
> conventions on how to tie interfaces together into a component, so it 
> isn't really separable.  Bonobo without CORBA wouldn't be Bonobo.

perhaps but looking at it it just seems to be very similar to COM
(IUnknown interface). An interface could be mapped to a back end.

> 
> >(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).
> >  
> >
> What do you see as the concrete benefits of replacing CORBA's interface 
> description language with XML?  A language binding can always ask the 
> ORB to describe the types (and with ORBit2, you can get full method 
> descriptions for object references).  I can't see what benefit changing 
> the on-disk representation of the interface descriptions will give.
> 
Well languages that dont have corba/orbit support for starters. XSLT
provides a mechanism for translating the bindings for languages
automatically and should be a lot less work than creating corba/orbit
support for every language. 


> 
> If you are interested in scripting of applications, one thing you could 
> do that would be useful would be to identify a set of requirements for 
> such a scripting framework, and then check those requirements against 
> the various options available.  If none of them meet all the 
> requirements, we would have some idea of what needs to be done to finish 
> them.  Some suggestions to get you started:
> 
>     * Must be easy to write code to glue the framework to a language.
>     * For dynamic languages, only a fixed amount of code should be
>       needed; ie. it shouldn't be necessary to pre-generate stub code.
>     * Must be easy for applications to expose their APIs.  ie. shouldn't
>       be too verbose (like the CORBA C mapping), or require the
>       developer to refactor their app too much.
>     * Have a type system that can support complex types (lists, structs,
>       etc).  Preferably recursive types (eg. a list of lists or list of
>       structs, etc).
>     * It would be nice if the same or a similar interface could be used
>       for in-process and out of process scripting.
> 
> You can probably think of others.

Yup thanks thats very helpful.

jamie.
> 
> James.