Re: GNOME messaging

[Michael Forrest <mef ezlink com>]

Elliot Lee wrote:
> This is just a matter of us continuing to export program interfaces, and
> then using a scripting language to use these interfaces.

Hi Elliot,

I agree that having external CORBA interfaces are a first step towards
interoperability. Having a scripting language to act as glue is also
helpful, especially with integration. Having a Perl binding to ORBit
will be very useful here. I am a little surprised Perl wasn't
mentioned in the appendices of the CORBA 3.0 Scripting language Draft
standard.

I guess what I am trying to get at is the ability to have a typed
and scoped messaging system, _including_ a broadcast facility.
This would be above and beyond the simpler client -> server direct
invocation model that is fundamental to CORBA. A typed event channel
(perhaps as per CosEvent Service or even CosNotification) would
allow this, so that you could broadcast events like "This file
has changed" or "can somebody please launch _this_ application".

Having a server listening for & acting on this last type of event
may well help with one of the sticking points in the
last baboon thread that I saw, where a big issue was server
activation. I have used HP's ORBPlus, which does have this facility
built-in. Though in the early stages it was quite buggy (nasty
race conditions involved with server start-up), it is now quite stable,
and a very helpful facility to use for real world objects/applications.

The ability to MAP abstract events to more concrete things
is probably the key to allowing true end user configurability. This
allows a general event like "somebody start a text editor on _this_
file" to "launch Vim on this file".

I think I may have got caught up in the shell interface thing; I
do believe, though, that it would provide a key improvement over
CDE. With that, invoking desktop actions from the shell requires
executing a separate binary ('dtaction') every time.

Regards,

Michael
-- 
Michael Forrest
mef@ozemail.com.au