Re: Accessability Interfaces

["Steve Lee" <steve fullmeasure co uk>]

Well I was really making a fairly general question ignoring the layers and
agree it depends on the language or libraries you use. 
My question was not so much the mechanics but more what you are conceptually doing.
Perhaps it is rather fuzzy distinction. It's all useful info thanks David.

My main
experience is with the windows equivs of MSAA and COM. Using C you can
do it the painful way of rolling all your own low level client
code, you can use general classes and libraries, you can use #imports that creates
classes for you from the IDL. In Python for general com you use Mark
Hammond's wonderful code that creates python classes from the IDL
(though event sinks are a little fidely).

From what I've seen ATK provides an abstract API devoid of CORBA
details and perhaps even a little different from AT-SPI. Rather like
the Python COM classes, or a library built on top of them.

Steve

On 11/8/06, Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman sun com> wrote:

Hi David, Steve:

I think there are two aspects to Steve's question.  One aspect has to do
with the exact API call syntax that the client uses to access AT-SPI,
which I think is what you are referring to.  The "raw" C CORBA bindings
are a bit ugly (while the python ones are elegant) but don't actually
require the client to add any CORBA-specific code.   The second aspect
of the question is the one I was addressing - whether the client needs
to know much about CORBA details.  That also depends a little on the
client's programming language, but mostly the answer is "no", the only
place where the AT-SPI client has to write any CORBA code is when it's
implementing the AT-SPI "EventListener" interface which it passes to the
AT-SPI Registry, via which the client receives event notifications from
running applications.

best regards

Bill

David Bolter wrote:
> Hi Steve,
>
> The at-spi hides nasty stuff like CORBA behind an API.  In early days we
> used the cspi bindings (for C), but we should all now use the normative
> C library libspi.  I imagine you are most interested in python bindings
> -- which I haven't used (yet).
>
> Note, gok hasn't migrated from cspi to libspi yet (blush).
>
> cheers,
> David
> GOK Maintainer
>
> Steve Lee wrote:
>
>> Out of interest do assistive technologies (AT) get to use an API or
>> library (similar to ATK for the server applications) or do they use
>> direct CORBA calls?
>>
>>

-- 
Steve Lee
www.oatsoft.org
www.fullmeasure.co.uk