[g-a-devel]Re: Announce: at-poke

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Michael Meeks wrote:
...
        Firstly, it's CVS module 'at-poke', it requires glade and uses
at-spi's
> cspi interface to do all it's good stuff.

Hey Michael:

This is really cool!  Thanks for building something that, at least
judging from the screenshot, looks like it'll be a pleasure to use
as well as being useful.

>         It allows you to browse the applications registered with the registry,
> and poke around at their innards to some (increasing) degree. Better, it
> has a pretty GtkTreeView that shows you the accessible hierarchy, and
> that almost all widgets don't have names - is that fair enough Bill ?

Hmm, maybe you just picked a fortuitous example for your screenshot, 
but the screenshot seems to show names for everything but the "filler"
widgets, which ATs pretty much ignore anyway.
 
>         Here is a screenshot of it in action:
> 
>                 http://primates.ximian.com/~michael/at-poke.png
> 
>         So; I'm hoping that I can get this to the stage where it can replace
> ferret - since it has a chance of working for every app, not just for
> pure in-proc ones.

I see it as complementary to ferret at the moment (I still think 
ferret's notebook UI is better for showing interface query) but
I'd love to see it replace ferret for everything but unit testing.

>         It's also a nice CORBA demo since nothing is cached, so every string
> and bit of state that is rendered ( and all the tree traversal )
> involves a CORBA roundtrip - so it's pleasing that it works well.

Yes, indeed!  I wish our AT developers had had this months ago
(but of course a lot less of it would have worked ;-)

>         Lastly, it seems to be throwing up a number of interesting bugs /
> warnings / mis-features around the place, so if you're worried about
> your code, play with it - before I find who to blame for whatever
> breakage lower down ;-)

Right... so there is still a use for the in-process tests like ferret
;-)

Thanks again!

-Bill

>         HTH,
> 
>                 Michael.
> 
> --
>  mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot