Re: Hrm. Now I know why this list is dead

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Dan Kegel wrote:
> How about "Enable AppleScript-like scripting of all KDE and Gnome apps"?
>

This is a matter of a) exporting CORBA interfaces from the apps and b)
writing appropriate language bindings for ORBit (Mico already has Perl,
C++ and maybe others)

I would tend to suggest writing C++ bindings for ORBit then dropping Mico,
since ORBit is a lot faster anyway. This avoids lots of effort duplication
as we add additional bindings. But I'm not going to do it, no time.
 
> What's the closest thing to a document describing how to
> do simple application scripting (e.g. open a file, save it under a
> different name, and print it) from, say, Tcl under KDE?  Under Gnome?
> 

There's no document; it's well-known though. Tcl won't work because AFAIK
there are no Tcl bindings for either Mico or ORBit. But say Perl; you just
write code to manipulate whatever interface the apps export.

The issue is whether KDE and Gnome apps will export the same interface for
doing the same things. For example, right now we are trying to reverse
engineer the interface between Excel and its chart component (and not
getting very far); but anyway, once it's done, it would be nice to share
that interface between Guppi and KChart.

This is just a matter of writing up some IDL and saying "OK, we will both
use this IDL." This does mean the IDL doesn't necessarily map trivially to
the internals of each app.

Havoc