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

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

ORBit2 is actually very compliant.  My understanding is that it
implements the complete CORBA 2.4 spec.  It is also very "stable"
(relatively few bugs against it - 37 total, only ten new bugs in the
past year).  It's had as much or more in-depth testing than anything in
the Gnome stack.

But in practice I am pretty sure any decent ORB would be able to handle
what we use in AT-SPI.  While we make good use of a number of CORBA
features (like struct, sequences, object sequences, interface
query, the 'any' struct, etc.), we don't use exotic stuff.

Bill

On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 11:33, Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:
> [ Samuel Thibault ]
> > > > I'm just wondering: can't any corba implementation (other than ORBit,
> > > > omniORB or TAO for instance) be used by Qt instead ?
> 
> We used TAO for KDE1 and abandoned it. Their website says: "Whereas compliance 
> with OMG specifications is a design goal of TAO, it is also a continuing 
> pursuit." This sounds similar to ORBit2 having implemented a 
> "subset" (according to Michael Meeks) of the OMG spec.
> 
> omniORB does not compile on all platforms we are targeting for KDE 
> applications and KDE-based assistive technologies (e.g. FreeBSD).
> D-Bus support will be part of Qt 4.2 and be easily available on all our target 
> platforms.
> 
> > 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 said, Trolltech is writing the bridge, and I accept the rule "Those who 
> do the work decide".
> 
> Besides, the GNOME accessibility team has been arguing against every single 
> change to AT-SPI that would make interoperability with Qt and KDE easier on  
> thegrounds that it would not benefit their end users. I simply stopped 
> listening to this line of argumentation.
> 
> > > It would also be no solution for the libbonobo dependency.
> >
> > I don't understand this. Doesn't Qt using another CORBA implementation
> > would let it be free from bonobo?
> 
> No, bonobo activation would still be used for dealing with the AT-SPI 
> registry, and the GNOME Accessibility team have made it clear that they do 
> not plan to change it in the CORBA-based version. This means going directly 
> for D-Bus is a better approach.
> 
> Also, you would still have ORBit2 etc as runtime dependencies because of the 
> at-spi registry. This only a problem for the suggestion to push the 
> bonobo-based AT-SPI into the LSB, because the LSB only accepts maintained 
> code.
> 
> Olaf
> 
> -- 
> Olaf Jan Schmidt, KDE Accessibility co-maintainer, open standards 
> accessibility networker, Protestant theology student and webmaster of 
> http://accessibility.kde.org/ and http://www.amen-online.de/
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