Re: Committed patch to bonobo-activation

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > > Yes, it's a bug that there is currently no public CORBA interface to
> > > libbonobo-activation. I'm hoping that will be fixed for 2.2.
> >
> > Ah, trouble is, we need it *now*...
> 
> It would be nice if I had known about this need before the API freeze,
> say around the time I posted a list of future plans which said a
> public CORBA interface was a post-2.0 item.

I agree.  However we did not know that the bonobo-activation IDL was not
public interface, and we also did not know about the implementation
problem that we have with the current API (use of a CORBA feature that
is not widely supported across ORBs).

> > Any chance we can get a subset agreed to before FCS?  We need to provide
> > something that uses it...
> > Probably just activate_from_id would be enough.
> >
> > Our interoperability between the Java Accessibility API and the Gnome
> > Accessiblity API requires it, and we really don't want to ship a Java
> > engine that depends on bonobo-activation binary internals...
> >
> 
> When there is a public CORBA interface, it will almost certainly be an
> in-process component and will require a C function call to get
> it. Otherwise, you have an infinite regress of bootstrapping
> problems. If you know of a better way to get at a primordial CORBA
> server that can be used for activating others, I'm all ears.

Not sure I understand you about CORBA interfaces 'requiring' C function
calls.  There are lots of ways to get IORs (some more kludgey than
others).  Once you have that, you can use CORBA to get the rest.

One thing that might make sense (since some bonobo features already
require X in their current incarnation) is to put the IOR as an X atom
(or whatever) attached to the root window.  That's more
distributed-computing-friendly that using a file..

> Another approach is to replicate the libbonobo-activation logic in
> Java (as MonkeyBeans did), but this is risky and unsupported.

Right.   We are reluctant to do this.

> Anyway, if we can come up with a good design and it's ready before the
> new "we really mean it this time" API freeze date, I'll consider it.
> 
>  - Maciej

We are doing our best (I am doing my best ;-) to track all this stuff. 
Accessibility cuts across the whole platform, so you sort of hafta be
omniscient to foresee all the issues.  Thanks for the offer, please let
us know how we can help.

-Bill
 
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