[gnome-db]bonobo in libgda

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

Hi!

I just had the other day a thought about porting libgda/gnome-db to
Glib/GTK/GNOME 2.0, and I came up with the idea of using bonobo in
libgda for that porting.

That is, bonobo, for GNOME 2.0, is being separated into a UI and a
non-UI part. The non-UI part includes the basic Bonobo infrastructure
(Bonobo::Unknown) apart from other interesting stuff, such as
Bonobo::Stream, Bonobo::Property, etc, and no UI stuff at all, so no
need for GTK, since it will be using GObject for the object type system.

The benefits of doing this, as far as I can see so far, would be a
cleaner implementation of the providers stuff (hiding lots of
CORBA-related stuff), as well as the integration with the rest of
Bonobo-based apps without even worrying about it. Also, we'd benefit
from having well-tested and documented CORBA interfaces that we can
easily reuse for our specific purpose (Bonobo::Stream to get, from a
provider, a large binary field, or Bonobo::Listener to get the providers
inform the clients connected to them (in fact, I was going to implement
myself a GDA::Listener interface)).
The integration will essentially mean that lots of bonobo-aware apps
will be able to talk with our components without knowing about them (and
of course, not knowing anything about our CORBA interfaces)

This will mean just adding a new library to the set of dependencies, but
getting, IMO, great benefits (specially for the integration).

Of course, this is a *huge* change, since it will mean reorganizing the
IDL interfaces, their implementations, the libgdaserver lib,... so I'd
like to throw out the idea to see what people think

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