Re: scripting with bonobo

[Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com>]

Hi Dirk,

On Mon, 26 Jun 2000, Dirk-Jan C . Binnema wrote:
> It's in the MSDN, you can find it at 
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/hosting/iactivescript/reference.htm

	Thanks;

> They use the much-hated IDispatch, which allows for runtime
> discovery. We could use DII/DSI; something like the ORBit bindings for Python and Perl
> do - parse some IDL file. 

	I am not convinced that DII/DSI does what we need, also it
certainly doesn't deal with security ie. it would be nice to know what
ramifications a method has / to allow passing a security mask eg. so we
can allow gui interaction but not file IO in a script.

	I am moderately convinced that cooking our own IDispatch interface
has many advantages; eg. the ambiguity between 'method invoke' and
'property get' implicit in MS' interface IIRC.

> > 	Sure; however the essence of bonobo's client wrappers is to try
> > and make everything _extremely_ easy for the programmer, so if you have
> > any ideas about how to do this, do let me know.
> 
> Yes. There's overlap with Automation here - you'll probably want to
> expose the same object model both inside the app (scripting) and
> outside the app (automation). And of course keep consistency - you
> don't want 'document.writer' in one app and 'currentdoc.author' in
> nother.

	Yes; to an extent this can be done nicely just using BonoboObjects
inside your application, but you will probably have to the aggregation
manualy, many people like a Gtk widget base.

> > 	Yes indeed, please do. Make a little test program, perhaps in
> > samples/script and get a testbed working if you can; do send patches to
> > the list as and when you hit milestones.
> 
> Yup. I'll try do write some stuff. Don't expect anything tomorrow,
> though...

	Excellent; I'm glad you are looking into this interesting problem;
please do let me know how you get on.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks@gnu.org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot