Re: Scripting in Gnome

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

(Apologies for snipping the quote attributions)

(my reply follows)
> >
> > What would be *really* nice is a desktop-wide object model (be it DOM or
> > something else) and proliferation of this among apps, so you can do
> > those absolutely incredible things you can do with COM/AppleScript.
> >
> > It's simply impossible to do some of the things on GNOME that you can do
> > with, say, Windows in terms of "remote control."
> >
> > We already have most (all?) of the pieces of the puzzle, there just
> > isn't wide-spread movement to get them into apps.  :(
> 
> Isn't this a job for DBUS?  I mean a lot of work needs to be done on the
> application side but having a set of interfaces with DBUS as the
> transport is a lot more flexible then a strict DOM that needs to be
> centrally designed.  I think what you will see on the desktop is more
> completeness on the lower levels with respect to kernel/desktop
> communication and then a move to focus on more application/desktop
> communication.  Not that these will happen serially...

Hey :-)

We have this already, via the python bindings for at-spi.  Us accessibility and 
AT-SPI folks have been focussing on accessibility-specific needs, but it's 
really amazing what can be done with python and at-spi - and how easily it can 
be done.  You can load scripts at runtime too, to manipulate all sorts of desktop 
objects.  For instance, in addition to listening to events and querying objects, 
you can

* focus objects and generate device events
* programmatically edit text, perform selections and change attributes;
* activate all the desktop GUI objects and widgets
* make selections in tables, trees, lists, and comboboxes

etc.

And it's already built into the apps!  In the cases where this doesn't already work as desired, it's due to implementation bugs/omissions in gail or the application's atk support, which need to get fixed for accessibility reasons anyhow.  Since it's an accessibility requirement that a user of an assistive technology be able to do every operation on the desktop from the AT, it means that all those operations are available via at-spi and at-spi's python bindings.

We just need some folks to start writing the scripts and clients, the tools are there.  It's just that nobody is taking advantage of this capability yet, outside of GOK and gnopernicus.

regards,

- Bill