Re: Ditching CORBA, again?

[Stefan Westerfeld <stefan space twc de>]

   Hi!

On Sun, Oct 10, 1999 at 05:52:06PM -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
> Dan Kegel wrote:
> > So it's quite clear: applications no longer use CORBA to talk
> > to their embedded components. 
> 
> This means, by the way, that you'll never be able to embed
> a KDE component inside a GNOME application, or vice versa,
>
> [...]
> 
> This is the first place KDE and GNOME are really diverging,
> I think.  I hope it's not permanent.

The current change in how embedding is handled inside KDE does in no
way affect the possibility of interoperability between KDE of Gnome. It
doesn't make it harder to implement that kind of thing, nor doesn't it
make it easier, just different. It's just eliminating a lot of performance
overhead inside KOffice, nothing more.

Let me try to explain:

As KOffice was founded, it used CORBA technology especially in a way so
that embedding parts written in any toolkit would be possible. That is
KOM/OpenParts/... . However, as Gnome reached a state where embedding
should be possible as well, they started some own, incompatible approach,
which is Baboon&Co.

I remember the discussions that took place back then, and the key arguments
against OpenParts where:

- nobody did Gtk+ embedding with that before, so the only support that was
  there was Qt wrapped widgets, signals&slots and similar

- the Gnome people were not really able to see how it worked, and as Torben
  still experimented with it, there was no good, coherent documentation
  available

- it was implemented in C++, and nobody (in Gnome) wanted to go with that,
  so rewriting was necessary anyway from scratch

So they decided not to use the standard Torben had invented - for instance
for "transparent" Gnome interoperability - and decided to redo the object
model from scratch (I remember the statement "we do not like the way it
works").

Whether or not this was a mistake or a blessing for both sides, due to that,
implementation of embedding between KDE/Gnome needs to be handled with
wrappers, as the CORBA apis of both approaches are incompatible from the
ground.

With the new Kanossa framework, writing those wrappers should be more or
less the same amount of work, you just need to write different code to
achieve the same result.

Wrappers are in discussion since both diverged, but nobody currently wanted
to work on that. I think, if there was somebody from either KDE or Gnome
stepping up and really wanting to achieve that, somebody from the other
side probably could be found to help with the internals of the other
embedding model. (I don't think that there are experts out there who have
deep knowledge of both embedding frameworks and both toolkits).

   Cu... Stefan
-- 
  -* Stefan Westerfeld, stefan@space.twc.de (PGP!), Hamburg/Germany
     KDE Developer, project infos at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde *-