Re: A question about naming components.

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Tue, 2002-05-14 at 14:29, Martin Sevior wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 	Pretty soon we'll release an AbiWord 1.0.2 rpm which supports the
> interfaces: bonobo
> control/embeddable/zoomable/printable/property
> bag/persist/persist stream/ persist file. 
> 
> It will be immediately embeddable in evolution and gnumeric. However I
> have a question about naming the component. We've named our component
> 
>   <oaf_server
> 	      iid="OAFIID:GNOME_AbiWord_Control"
> 	      type="factory"
> 	      location="OAFIID:GNOME_AbiWord_ControlFactory">
> 
> However I noticed that many other components have long, randomly
> generated text strings after their names. What is the purpose of
> those? 
>
that was used some time ago, but are not used anymore. You can safely
use GNOME_Abiword_Control for your component.

> Should we do the same? If we release 1.0.3 with a different string 
> of random characters will it still work with evolution/gnumeric?
> 
evolution queries OAF for the components installed, so it does not
matter really what OAFIID the component has, unless evolution is using
directly a hard-coded OAFIID, which is not the case.

What is important is to specify in the .oaf file the interfaces your
component supports, so that evolution (or others) get your component's
OAFIID when they query OAF for components of a given type.

> More-over if a random hacker wants to use the AbiWord component in her
> application will she have to get the long random string of characters
> exactly correct when asking for the AbiWord control?
> 
a bad hacker would, but a good hacker would query OAF for the component
implementing some characteristics (implements some interface, has this
property, supports this MIME type, etc), not hard-coding the OAFIID :-)

cheers