Re: GNOME CVS: gnome-core mmclouglin

["Dirk-Jan C. Binnema" <bulkmeel yahoo co uk>]

Op zo 02-12-2001, om 10:14 schreef Maciej Stachowiak:

> On 28Nov2001 01:21PM (+0100), Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > 
> > having remote components would be so good for GNOME, that I can't see
> > why there's even a discussion about it :-) As I say, if I have remote
> > components, I can do a lot of nice things for a lot of office
> > environments.
> 
> While distributed applications are nice, I don't think the component
> model is necessarily the best layer for solving these kinds of
> problems. An application-specific client-server model using a more
> lightweight protocol like SOAP instead of relying on X and CORBA.

I don't think SOAP is 'more lightweight' than CORBA; quite the contrary;
SOAP requires expensive XML-parsing on both sides, and has a very
inefficient wire-format. 

[SOAP does have the advantage of being able to piggyback on http, thus
evading firewalls, and being stateless, which makes distributed
components easier -- see the problems with distributed ref counting and
such...]

> Examples:
> 
> * Instead of running your addressbook on your iPAQ displaying to your
> desktop, wouldn't you rather have both your iPAQ and your desktop
> both talk to a network server that manages your addressbook info and
> arbitrates concurrent access?
> 
> * Instead of running a load applet on your server and displaying to
> your desktop, why not have a load monitoring system that separates
> the monitoring part, which runs on the server, from the GUI, which
> runs on any other machine and connects at any time (perhaps even from
> multiple machines at once) with suitable authentication credentials?
> 
> Anyway, while the idea of remote components is interesting, in
> practice the network is _not_ transparent. It has high latency, it has
> low bandwidth, and it goes down all the time. To get robustness and
> decent performance, you are better off using protocols that can cope
> with this non-idea behavior.

Well, CORBA is one easy way to write network servers...
 
> GNOME should aim to make it easier to develop networked client-server
> applications instead of relying on heavyweight RPC or remote display
> hacks. Support for SOAP and associated protocols is a step in the
> right direction.

"Regular" CORBA programming (ie. nog-GNOME) is quite a bit easier when
using Bonobo and it's support libraries (such as OAF/BAF), and I've seen
some interest in this area. If only we could use Bonobo for remote
components...


--Dirk-Jan.

-- 
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Dirk-Jan Binnema, djcb djcbsoftware nl, www.djcbsoftware.nl
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