Re: Why gnome apps should offer both guile and Corba.

[Nathan Carl Summers <summersn cs byu edu>]

On Wed, 4 Mar 1998 jheintz@iconcomp.com wrote:

> I have made these opinions after having to work with Microsoft's
> COM recently.  Besides being brutally painful in way to many
> area's, some of what it gives developers is just really useful.

Just because Microsoft does it The Wrong Way doesn't mean we have to.
 
> Let's take an example.  Pretend that every time I edit a file in
> my gnome editor that I want to record this in a log that I keep for
> recovery purposes in case I screw up some part of my system.
> 
> ----How would I do this with Corba (or with COM)?  
> Assuming: that the gnome editor exported to Corba some way
> to register for events like "file changed" and "file saved".
> 1) I would write a script X in some corba client to launch the 
> editor with the file.
> 2) Script X would register interest in the "file changed" event.
> 3) When script X got the "file changed" event it would record 
> this in my log.
> 
> Drawback: if I had another script Y that launched the editor
> with a file and recorded every time I spell checked a file I would
> be unable to run the editor from both of these scripts.  I couldn't
> record that I had edited a file _and_ spell checked it.  Additionally
> I would have know which one I wanted to do at launch time to pick
> the correct script.

No, the CORBA system would work the same way as the guile system -- the
editor would inform the logging object of the events, and the logging
object would inform the proper objects -- scripts X and Y in your example.
There is no requirement that only one object recieve an event if the
system is designed properly.  If it's not -- well, fix it!  That's what
Free Software is all about!

Now, there are problems with CORBA, like the fairly kludgy C interface,
but that isn't one of them.

Rockwalrus