Re: online desktop APIs

[Rob Taylor <rob taylor codethink co uk>]

Owen Taylor wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-04-10 at 19:49 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I blogged a few days ago about the idea of an "online desktop." For our 
>> initial prototypes, we've taken a pretty ad hoc approach that tends to 
>> leak Mugshot specifics in a messy and undocumented way.
>>
>> I brought up the idea of lots of different apps on the desktop taking 
>> advantage of online services and web sites, and we'd need clean APIs for 
>> that.
>>
>> I don't want to write a bunch of hypothetical APIs in a vacuum but I 
>> picked two that we are already using and cleaned them up / genericized 
>> them to illustrate the idea:
>>    http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Online_Desktop_API
>>
>> As background, the reason there are dbus APIs is that the Mugshot 
>> process is establishing a connection to mugshot.org via XMPP and sucking 
>> down a lot of information; this would be too expensive to do in every 
>> application. So the architecture is to have one or a few dedicated 
>> process(es) that go out to the Internet, and then other apps can get the 
>> info from these services. This also simplifies matters as we address 
>> offline operation and local caching, since the services can deal with it 
>> and not the individual apps.
> 
> A few general concerns... (I brought these up with Havoc, but wanted to
> write them down here for the broader audience.)
<snip>


>  - When dealing with network protocols (or even D-BUS interfaces),
>    it's far too easy to get sloppy and skip documentation or let
>    the documentation get out of sync with the code. Documenting
>    things in text form on a Wiki doesn't work, because it's simply
>    far too easy to skip the step and not update the wiki. We need
>    to have the same level of integration that we have with gtk-doc
>    for C code, where updating the documentation is an integral
>    part of updating the interface.


Agreed, to this end, I've got a dbus-doc project going on fd.o[1], based
off Jon McCann's stuff for ConsoleKit. Its still very very young, so
comments and input much appreciated.

I also have concerns that this seems very mudflap-oriented. It'd be nice
to see some synergy going with eds-dbus. Personally I'd like to see an
fd.o standard for accessing contact information. Also presence-wise we
already have Galago and Telepathy, it'd be good to get a discussion
going how all this fits together.


Thanks,
Rob Taylor

[1] http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/?p=dbus/dbus-doc.git;a=summary