ANNOUNCE: fugue - a CORBA/GUI experiment

[Samuel Solon <ssolon usa net>]

Fugue is an experiment in building a GUI system based on CORBA components.
The flexibility gained by implementing GUI objects as separate CORBA
objects with a simple, common, front-end seems like a good match to the
non-centralized approach of Gnome.

Separating the implementation of an object (such as a filesystem) from the
presentation (the actual user interface portion) should make it possible to
have many different interface styles without having to reimplement access
to the underlying system. People (and you know who you are) who dislike one
interface style can build a different one on top of the existing objects.

Rather than just propose yet another "great idea" I have implemented
several pieces of such a system to investigate what is needed.

The overall system is based on "components" and "containers".

There are two "back-ends" which implement containers (and their components).
A file-server which presents files as containers/components and a
print-server which acts as a container for a print queue (and is probably
highly dependent on the format on my Gnu/Debian Linux system).

A front end program, "fugue", presents the containers and components in one
of three views: icon, detail or explorer.

I present these as an experiment -- not finished products. There are many
restrictions, unimplemented pieces and stuff that just doesn't work very well.

More information can be found at:

	http://home.att.net/~ssolon/fugue