Re: GNOME & KOM/OP

[Adam Chodorowski <archmage earthdome com>]

> it appears to me that all what you want to do (or ayt least most part of it) was done 
> elegantly and without wasting much resources with the amiga's arexx port .

Very true.
 
> each application provided an arexx port where to which other application could talk, so 
> you could reemplace for example one editor with arexx bindings by another one and such on.

For those who don't have an Amiga: ARexx is a scripting language that is
standard in the OS since WAY back. It's originally based on IBM's REXX
lanugage. It's quite nice, and very easy to learn.
What's makes it so nice is that it is very well designed for
inter-program/process communication.
A program, that want's to support ARexx, creates an ARexx-port (a
standard message-port) and adds
it do the systems list of public ports. Then, when a ARexx-script is
launched you could do something like this:

	'address GFXAPP_AREXXPORT'		/* not really needed, but anyway :) */  
	
	'openfile "mypicture.jpg" JPEG'	
	'savefile "mypicture.gif" GIF'

With some added stuff you have a script that batch-converts JPEG-files
to GIF-files, and the program itself doesn't have to ha such builtin
functionality. 

The 'openfile' and 'savefile' commands are implemented by the program.
Actually, the ARexx-server doesn't know which program implements a
specific command, it just sends the command to the first ARexx-port
that's in the list. If the program doesn't know about the command, it
sends it to the next Arexx-port. Actually I'm not sure if it is the
Arexx-server or the individual programs that implement this, but the
important thing is that the command is sent from port to port until it
is recognised. And then the program executes the command.
The 'address' command just specifies which port to begin with, and isn't
really necessary.

How about incorporating a similar approach into Guile? That way you
don't need another scripting language, and you get a VERY powerful tool. 

> It is sad that there are so few amiga users on this project, (or ex amiga users) because i
> think that there are yet some fields in which the amiga way of doing things could be very 
> useful for gnome (another field was the datatypes that were discussed some time ago.).

I'm not on the project, not as a developer that is, but I'm an
Amiga-user. Isn't that nice? :)
 
> BTW, have a look at Directory OPUS for the amiga (site : http://www.gpsoft.com.au/) they make 
> a great desktop/file manager for amigaos and plan to release an window version nextly.

A DOpus (4.11) clone for GNOME would be way cool. 

-- 
Adam Chodorowski (archmage@earthdome.com)