Re: org.gnome.Application DBus Interface

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Mon, 2007-08-13 at 21:01 +0100, Alex Jones wrote:
> (It seems some of my mail is going missing. This will screw up the
> threading but whatever.)
> 
> Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 17:45 +0100, Alex Jones wrote:
> > > Hi list
> > > 
> > > the org.gnome.Application DBus interface provides a way for
> > applications
> > > to expose common application functionality in a standardised way.
> > > 
> > sounds pretty good... it would indeed be very useful to start using
> > this
> > for apps to export actions, so, what about adding a:
> > 
> > InvokeAction (action_name, arguments)
> > 
> > method? That way, we could use this interface for calling actions (not
> > based on (complicated) URIs) on the app. Rhythmbox could just have
> > several actions, like Play/Pause/Volume up-down/etc
> > 
> > That would be very useful (as we tried to do on the CORBA days) for
> > automation
> 
> Actually what is a better solution here is to use a different interface,
> such as the common media player interface described here:
> <http://wiki.xmms2.xmms.se/index.php/Media_Player_Interfaces>. That way,
> making Rhythmbox "pause" becomes a case of calling
> (org.gnome.MediaPlayer).Pause() rather than
> (org.gnome.Application).InvokeAction("Pause")
> 
yeah, might be better, but in this case you will end up with lots of
interfaces. Think when apps start doing heavy use of this, to
communicate with app A you need the A interface, the B interface for app
B, etc.

For the most common cases (media player, file manager), of course it
might make sense, but I was thinking of this as a way to invoke actions
on *all* apps (that support it, of course), rather than just a media
player or some specific app.
-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>