Re: OAF and XServiceInfo

[Michael Hoennig "(mi)" <mi sun com>]

> > Core reflection, btw, is analyzing the interfaces of objects down to
> > methods and their argument types and return types. Introspection
> > interprets that stuff and gathers additional data from method calls (i.e.
> > to find out runtime properties), it is mostly for scripting engines.

> This is already handled in CORBA by DynAny, DSI, DII, the Interface
> Repository and the like. Do you think the OpenOffice-specific
> technologies for this are better than the CORBA standard ones? I am
> not very familiar with either.

If you don't know either of them, why do you discuss about it? It was 
actually you, who started talking about (a third) spec for reflection.

BTW: Our reflections and introspection design comes from Java APIs. And 
that we can hardly do thinks really different from Java, I already explained.

> > > * But boy, it would be nice to be able to do queries about running
> > >   activated objects even if they were not activated by a standard OAF
> > >   method. That seems rather compelling to me. It makes for a powerful
> > >   system-wide introspection facility, not merely a per-object one.
> >
> > That's why I would suggest, not to put it into the OAF.
>
> Why is that a reason not to put it in OAF? I was claiming it was a
> reason it _should_ be in OAF. Perhaps one of us is confused. What I
> wanted to suggest is that you should be able to do the equivalent of
> an `oaf_query' on all running objects in the system, which would allow
> you to find all the objects that meet certain conditions. This
> requires centralization I think.

Ok, so you are speaking about a query over ALL runtime objects. That was 
not clear to me. I was just speaking about inspecting a specific runtime 
object. Your feature sounds nice, but still, I would prefer having two 
different components  -just sharing the query code.

> But to be honest, I don't know what you do and don't want to put in. 
> I want to see something which provides information similar to
> XServiceInfo and also to OAF_ServerInfo for running objects. Are you
> talking about that, or the low-level introspection stuff above?

Yes, I think we had to different definitions of "introspection" here. But 
I already defined, which is what in my terminology.

But, anyway, I don't want to talk about runtime object queries right now. 
I think there are more important problems.

> > > If service specs were entirely separate from OAF, all the info in the
> > > service spec would have to be duplicated in the oafinfo file.
> >
> > I would mostly say, C code is duplicated in o files as well - somehow ;-)
>
> But the .o files are generated from the .c files by a compiler. If you
> think .oafinfo files can be automatically generated from .svc files or
> vice versa, that would be great but I cannot think of how at the
> moment.

That was my idea. I think it is possible to generate .oafinfo files from 
service specs. The other way around is not possible, because service 
specs contain a lot of words called "documentation" as well ;-)

	Michael