Re: Some of this, some of that, Idea's really.

[Owen Taylor <otaylor gtk org>]

[ Cc: list trimmed to the single relevant gnome.org list ]

Christian Scholz <ruebe@aachen.heimat.de> writes:

> > and, just to remain in topic, Amiga as the Rexx language to do heavy
> > interprocess communication.
> 
> Right, I miss that under Linux.. 
> 
> > How about Gnome? 
> > How can I write (for example) a script that starts an http-robot, download a
> > page, parserize it and send some datas to other applications without passing
> > throught a file?
> 
> I was thinking about it and I think the solution here should be not to
> have one single language to do that but have stubs for all the languages
> out there (like Python, Perl, guile, C, etc.)
> 
> So what's needed is a standard API with which apps can tell the system
> which functions they understand and also which parameters are accepted
> for each of them.
> Maybe there should also be one common set of functions to call like
> QUIT, HELP, etc.

Hmmm. that sort of rings a bell... Doesn't that "CORBA" thing
do something like that?  ;-)

Interprocess, lanuage independent stubs is what CORBA is all
about.

The second part of what you describe is basically the CORBA
Interface Repository (IR). There would presumably be a common
Gnome App interface, and applications could also have additional
domain specific interfaces.

[ Tom Tromey wrote some preliminary IDL for such things, though
  they haven't been implemented anywhere yet ]

Regards,
                                        Owen