Re: GNOME CVS: gnome-core mmclouglin

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

Hi Maciej,

On Sun, 2001-12-02 at 10:14, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On 28Nov2001 01:21PM (+0100), Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> > 
> > having remote components would be so good for GNOME, that I can't see
> > why there's even a discussion about it :-) As I say, if I have remote
> > components, I can do a lot of nice things for a lot of office
> > environments.
> 
> While distributed applications are nice, I don't think the component
> model is necessarily the best layer for solving these kinds of
> problems. An application-specific client-server model using a more
> lightweight protocol like SOAP instead of relying on X and CORBA.
> 
yes, it would make sense if SOAP was more lightweight than CORBA, which
it is not. And, I'm talking essentially about non-UI components, which
won't need at all X for GNOME 2

> Examples:
> 
> * Instead of running your addressbook on your iPAQ displaying to your
> desktop, wouldn't you rather have both your iPAQ and your desktop
> both talk to a network server that manages your addressbook info and
> arbitrates concurrent access?
> 
> * Instead of running a load applet on your server and displaying to
> your desktop, why not have a load monitoring system that separates
> the monitoring part, which runs on the server, from the GUI, which
> runs on any other machine and connects at any time (perhaps even from
> multiple machines at once) with suitable authentication credentials?
> 
yes, but this means extra work. That is, for each Bonobo component whose
features I want to access remotely, I have to do a client API and a
server, apart of course from the Bonobo component itself.

> Anyway, while the idea of remote components is interesting, in
> practice the network is _not_ transparent. It has high latency, it has
> low bandwidth, and it goes down all the time. To get robustness and
> decent performance, you are better off using protocols that can cope
> with this non-idea behavior.
> 
this is true for Internet-wide communications, where SOAP (or other
HTTP-based RPC) makes a lot of sense. But what I'm talking is about an
office environment, that is, an intranet, where remote CORBA components
make a lot of sense.

And as I said, along with other people, SOAP is no more lightweight than
CORBA. SOAP has a lot of XML-parsing performance issues

> GNOME should aim to make it easier to develop networked client-server
> applications instead of relying on heavyweight RPC or remote display
> hacks. Support for SOAP and associated protocols is a step in the
> right direction.
> 
> > I wish I had the knowledge and the time to just provide the patch to
> > bonobo-activation for supporting remote components and have this thread
> > end :-(
> 
> The thread was really only about icons for remote components, not
> necessarily remote components in general (which are not impossible to
> use currently, but not totally transparent either.
> 
with oaf/bonobo-activation? how is it possible to use remote components
with them?

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