Re: GNOME 2.8: Scripting

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 29/03/04 17:59, Rodrigo Moya wrote:

> Hi
>
> One nice thing to have for GNOME 2.8 could be scripting of applications.
> For this, we need a standard and easy way for applications to register
> methods to be called from scripts and have those methods called.
>
> So, I've been thinking this weekend (over some beers, so I apologize in
> advance if some things don't make sense :-) about this, and this is:
>
> * add signals to GnomeProgram like "getMethodList" and "runMethod", so
> that apps can implement them and thus add support for scripting. I know
> some people want to not add new features to libgnome* so that they can
> be obsolete in a future. If so, I guess we could then have a
> FooScripting (or whatever) class that implements this. The question is,
> where?
>
> * as for the internal implementation, the obvious choice, at least to
> me, seems to be BonoboApplication, which already has support for the 2
> methods mentioned above. If we were to use BonoboApplication, we could
> just avoid the step above, and so have applications that want to add
> scripting support use BonoboApplication directly.
> Other implementation choices are using d-bus.
>
> That's all I've thought, since I drunk too many beers, but I wanted to
> share it so that some discussion could go on. So, any comments?
>  
The main problem with the interface you list above is that it is 
extremely limited.  The BonoboApplication interface seems to only 
provide a collection of functions you can invoke on the application.

This isn't really going to be sufficient for larger applications where 
you would probably want to expose multiple objects (eg. gnumeric might 
provide operations you can invoke on each sheet and/or workbook you have 
open, and maybe other operations you can invoke on cells or ranges).

Rather than having a toy scripting interface for simple apps and a 
different one for serious apps, a single API would be preferable.

James.

--
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/