Re: Newbie question.

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Michael Meeks wrote:

> 
> Hi Martin,
> 
> On Fri, 22 Dec 2000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> >        Is it possible to construct a Bonobo property-bag of functions
> > and export it via an ORBit server without wrapping everything in a
> > GtkWidget?
> 
>         I don't quite understand what you are trying to achieve; let me
> make a few guesses:
> 
> Q.
>         1. Export CORBA function pointers of some sort via a property bag
>         2. Not use GtkObjects inside your bonobo code
>         3. Not use GtkWidget to export a Control.
> 
> A.
>         1. No, no such thing is possible; it would be evil and nasty to do
> this, whilst CORBA has a nice type system it is totaly broken wrt.
> introspecting interfaces; you want to write a chunk of IDL to export your
> interfaces.
>         

OK this was what I trying to do.

>         2. No way to do this until Gnome 2.0 when we will switch to
> GObjects
>         
>         3. You can write custom rendering things inside a control as long
> as in some way you can fit them into a widget; perhaps render to an off
> screen buffer and whack to a drawing area, steal the X window id or
> somesuch; either way a bonobo_control wants / needs a widget.
>         
>         3.<alt>. You don't need to export a widget interface you could
> implement a canvas item instead perhaps.
>

I wanted to avoid the work of doing these at first.

> > I want to enable scripting of Abiword via a remote program so that  
> > (initially at least) we do need to display any GUI stuff in a remote
> > container.
>         
>         Scripting should be done by constructing CORBA interfaces for your
> functionality and wrapping these around your internal structure, currently
> this involves lots of boilerplate typing; you'd do best to copy the
> echo-client and modify the IDL perhaps.
> 

I was trying to avoid this by employing a property bag without writing a
gtkwidget. Thanks for the tip. 

Martin