Re: SPI portability

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

To follow up on my own post, for clarification:

[...]
>For instance, accessibility for legacy Motif apps could be delivered
>via a "Motif Accessibility Bridge" which wrote to the SPI.  Even more
>expedient would be implementing ATK interfaces on behalf of Motif
>widgets, which then could directly re-use the IPC "bridge" code (which
>we are calling the "Gnome Bridge" for short).  The disadvantage, which
>might be minor depending on one's point of view, is that the
>accessibility code for Motif would need to link to Gnome's glib
>library.  

I mean by this that if a toolkit chooses ATK as its internal 
accessibility API, it will need to link to libatk and glib (both LGPL, 
by the way).

However a toolkit could choose to implement an accessibility interface 
that is functionally equivalent to ATK instead, and avoid this 
dependency.  However in this latter case the toolkit would have to 
implement to the SPI's IDL in its own "bridge" and could not reuse the 
"gnome bridge" for this purpose.  Clearly this second approach, while 
devoid of language and library dependencies and thus very flexible, is a 
good bit more work, since more of the accessibility architectural layers 
would need to be implemented for the new toolkit.

Finally, note that the shared object library that is the "standard" 
binding to the "client-side" (AT) SPI has glib dependencies, so if the 
standard bindings are used then there will be a package-level dependency 
on glib anyway.  In theory there could be alternate implementations of 
the broker and the bindings (to the same IDL), thus avoiding glib, but 
it's hard to see a good reason for going to that trouble.

-Bill

>-Bill
>
>> _______________________________________________
>> gnome-accessibility-list mailing list
>> gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
>> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list
>
>-- 
>--------------
>Bill Haneman
>Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
>Sun Microsystems Ireland
>
>_______________________________________________
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>gnome-accessibility-list gnome org
>http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-accessibility-list

------
Bill Haneman x19279
Gnome Accessibility / Batik SVG Toolkit
Sun Microsystems Ireland