Reuse of Bonoboo IDLs

[Ewan Birney <birney sanger ac uk>]

[Grr. I tried to cross post this to orbit and gnome-components, but
I had to subscribe to gnome-components-list first. Not sure which list
is more appropiate - feel free to tell me not to post here...]


I'd like to have a little advice on reusing bonoboo interfaces
in other projects. I want to propose a set of IDL interfaces
for bioinformatics software so people can write software to defined 
interfaces. As well as the more domain specific issues, there are
generic issues such as reference counting, introspection, persistence
of objects both in databases and stored in files.

I have browsed around the Gnome component IDLs and I am impressed
by their simplicity and focus on solving the problems at hand. I prefer
them by and large to the OMG LifeCycle and Persistence standards. The
questions I need advice on are:

1) Does anyone *advise* looking at the OMG specifications. In otherwords
are there some hidden gotcha's in using the Gnome specifications?

2) If I do use the Gnome basic objects (the first to use is the
GNOME::Unknown) is it better to reuse the GNOME::Unknown as the
actual name of interface in my, or should I make a MyModule::Unknown
interface that happened to look identical to GNOME::Unknown (?).
In other words, is the bonoboo framework meant to be general or specific
to desktop applications?


3) Has anyone done something similar and wants to share their experiences?


Finally - the Persist series of interface is very file orientated - which
is cool. Is there anyone out there who regular stores things in databases
(mysql/postgres style?). This is the more common behaviour in
bioinformatics. Any thoughts? I presume that all these idl's play well
with XML in addition.



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