Re: [g-a-devel] [Accessibility-atspi] AT-SPI and D-Bus

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

For the record, I would be happy to try and remove the few remaining
Bonobo API dependencies from AT-SPI (currently we only use three
methods, which I believe could easily be removed/wrapped so that the IDL
did not pull in Bonobo_Unknown.idl.)

Of course the current libspi.so would continue to use the Bonobo
back-end, but the ABI exposed to clients and services would not expose
any Bonobo details and thus would be compatible with any
non-Bonobo-based implementation.  As Samuel points out, this would mean
any CORBA ORB would be sufficient.

However I believe this whole concern is based on a misunderstanding of
AT-SPI's "bonobo dependency". The gnome-java-bridge for 
Java applications currently speaks AT-SPI via CORBA using the built-in 
Java ORB.  It doesn't link to ORBit2 or libbonobo, etc., it just
provides its own trivial implementations for BonoboUnknown (it's only
about three methods, after all).  This means that the "Bonobo
Dependency" in AT-SPI is not a real dependency on anything but the
three CORBA methods in Bonobo_Unknown.idl.

> But less than using ORBit (and bare with bonobo dependency), right? That
> might meet everyone's need: keep at-spi in a CORBA protocol, so that
> gnome and Qt accessibility work together, but avoid ORBit dependencies.

As I point out above, this is already the case - AT-SPI doesn't 
depend on any bonobo ABI other than the trivial Bonobo_Unknown.idl,
which is already "pure CORBA".  

I know of only one place in libspi.so where we actually call
ORBit-specific API (and I am looking for an alternative to that line of
code, because of 
issues just like this - we don't want to be tied to a specific ORB).

> > It would also be no solution for the libbonobo dependency.

I don't believe there is a libbonobo dependency, except as an
implementation detail of the existing libspi.so.  

So: for KDE applications serving up accessibility information, writing
to ATK (assuming the glib main loop problem is resolved) would suffice. 
For the short-to-medium term the app could then LD_PRELOAD the existing
atk-bridge, without caring about the implementation details, and it
would work with orca, gok, and gnopernicus.

For KDE accessibility utilities or KDE assistive technologies, you could
use C++ CORBA bindings (which are lots nicer than the C bindings), and
your choice of ORB.  

regards,

Bill

> I don't understand this. Doesn't Qt using another CORBA implementation
> would let it be free from bonobo?
> 
> Samuel
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