Re: Towards better OAF/Bonobo integration

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On 28 Jul 2001 18:40:27 -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On 29Jul2001 03:18AM (+0200), Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> >
> > I really think this is a good idea
> > 
> 
> Glad you think so.
> 
> > and yes, just one comment, and sorry for insisting, but, what about remote object activation?
> > AFAIK, it does not work yet, so I think this OAF/Bonobo integration
> > could be the right moment to think about this. Remote object activation
> > is very important for a component system,
> > and this is, IMO, what GNOME's component system is missing.
> > 
> > The other day, talking with some friends, I learnt that the "agreed
> > upon" (supposedly this was said by Elliott) solution for this was to use
> > rsh to connect to the remote system and then start an oafd on that
> > machine. I really think this solution is not very good.
> > 
> > So, what about having a second oaf daemon, integrated in inetd, which
> > listens to a pre-established port for remote oaf's?
> > I don't know too much what would be involved in the communication
> > between the remote oaf's, but I suppose the work to do it would be the
> > same in the rsh-case than in the inetd-service case
> 
> I'll try to write up some thoughts about remote activation. I'm not
> sure if the inetd approach will work because oafd is per-user. I think
> if you did the rsh-type approach, only with ssh, the result might be
> almost reasonable.
> 
ok, maybe the inetd case is not the best, but using ssh suffers from the
same than
using rsh: you rely on an external server, which may not be installed or
available for
some environments where oaf is installed. For example, in some
corporations you might
not be allowed to install a ssh server in your workstation
That's why I talk about an independent server, either integrated in
inetd or
standalone, which is installed as part of OAF.

> I don't think I've run into a real case where transparent remote
> activation is that important yet, though.
> 
I have, and I'm sure lots of people also have run into these cases. For example:
* gaia (http://www.es.gnome.org/proyectos/gaia), which is a distributed
admin
tool, where some components are running on each machine, and there must
be a way
for the components in one machine to talk to components in another. Of
course, this
can be done with a custom network protocol, but it fits better if the
components
can be activated regardless of the machine they're running into.
* gnome-db: you might want to use the Oracle provider, but you've got
only a license
for 5 simultaneous connections, so you could install the provider (which
is a CORBA
object) in one machine, and have hundreds of clients connecting to the
database through
the provider and thus use only the allowed 5 connections

and a lot more cases which, IMO, would make GNOME the perfect platform
for desktop
development, where distributed computing is more and more common.

Anyway, I really appreciate that you take this into account, I'll be
waiting for your
thoughts :-)

cheers

-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> - <rodrigo ximian com>
http://www.gnome-db.org/ - http://www.ximian.com/