Re: Trying to reach consensus for the proposed modules

[James Henstridge <james jamesh id au>]

Emmanuele Bassi wrote:

>On Sun, 2006-01-15 at 11:17 +0100, Chipzz wrote:
>  
>
>>On Thu, 12 Jan 2006, Paolo Borelli wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>support disabled. That said we think that python support is a really
>>>important feature and it's having a huge success (I have seen more
>>>plugins in the last month than in the last two years). I'd love that
>>>      
>>>
>>A comment here which not only refers to gedit, but also to those other
>>apps which are creating plugins: do we actually have a standard consis-
>>tant cross-application framework for scripting?
>>    
>>
>
>Why on earth would I want to drop the ability to actually make a python
>plugin, or a perl plugin, or a ruby plugin, or a ${WHATEVER} plugin and
>do it using something like VBA instead?
>
>With python or perl or ruby or haskell or scheme we have an entire
>language with its own entire framework (for perl, think CPAN) with its
>own community of developers.  VBA is some half-assed common denominator
>- which is not useful enough.
>
>Please, don't we just copy windows for the sake of copying it.  VBA is
>definitely *not* the way to go, WRT to "scripting"; especially if we
>compare it with the solutions we do have.
>  
>
I guess the scripting framework Chipzz is talking about is actually
COM.  When people talk about VBA scripting on Windows, they are often
talking about using Visual Basic to script the COM objects exposed by
the various applications they have on the system.

The application developers don't add "VBA" support to their app; they
add COM support, which benefits any language that can manipulate COM
objects (VB, Perl, Python, .Net languages, etc).

The closest we've had to this is Bonobo, but it was quite difficult to
use and the CORBA/Bonobo bindings for scripting languages weren't ready
at the time.  This meant that it made it more difficult to write the app
and provided no concrete benefit in a lot of cases.

The GObject introspection system mentioned earlier in the thread might
provide a suitable base for such a generalised scripting framework.

James.

>Ciao,
> Emmanuele.
>
>  
>