Re: bonobo-activation - a plan.

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 30Oct2001 07:17PM (-0500), Michael Meeks wrote:
> 
> Hi Bill,
> 
> On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > Actually it does not, for reasons that I have already detailed.  We
> > don't have a 'single service' that we are interested in - except
> > perhaps the bonobo-activation service itself ;-)
> 
>         Right.
> 
> > We really need to have a non-JNI, non-C-bound way of querying
> > bonobo-activation.  It makes sense to do this via IDL for the
> > activation service, and I think we should agree to do this in
> > principle as soon as possible.
> 
>         I feel uncomfortable that you are re-implementing a part of
> bonobo-activation's client code in Java - but if that's the only way for
> you it seems reasonable to me.
> 
> > As for the bootstrapping of an 'idle' activation server, we can easily
> > add a startup/bootstrap call to the 'java' script, since JVM
> > invocations are normally started via scripts and not by directly
> > invoking the VM's binary.  That way we can be assured that the
> > activation service is awake when we make the Java accessibility bridge
> > calls (which happen very early in the Java application's lifecycle).
> 
>         Ok - that sounds fine; when you say 'script' what do you mean ?
> you see, it's all very well having a sort of 'System.execute' approach to
> launching the server - but currently the locking to ensure you only get
> one server is all done in the client side - ie. the C library code. It
> would be pain to replicate it and get it right in Java, IMHO.
> 
>         So; if your script could execute a little C program, that we
> always install that'd be great; eg. if you run bonobo-activation-run-query
> with no args, that will ensure ( by the time it completes ) that the
> server is correctly started up.
> 

Oh, I forgot to mention - bonobo-activation comes with a program
bonobo-activation-client which will activate an arbitrary server for
you and print out the IOR. This can be used as a means of integration
of last resort.

Bill, would that be good enough for your purposes? The command-line
tool would take care of launching the server if need be. It would not
handle shlib objects very well since it would exit after activation in
that case, but perhaps it can be changed to stick around in the case
of an shlib server.

 - Maciej