Re: GEM : Gnome Event Manager

[Tom Tromey <tromey creche cygnus com>]

Olivier> It would be interesting to have a central piece of software
Olivier> through which apps could pipe their important events. It
Olivier> would allow the user to choose actions associated with
Olivier> events. This could be done as a new layer over the CORBA
Olivier> Event Service.

I agree that we need something like an event service.  I read the
CORBA Event Service docs today.  It seems really complicated and
gratuitous, like most of what comes of OMG (IMHO, of course).  Still,
I don't see any real barriers to implementing the Event Service on top
of any ORB.


Another generic service it would be useful to have is a confirmation
interface.  A confirmation is like an event, but the consumer can veto
the action.

I addressed both events and confirmers in my proposed interfaces.


How important are the OMG-specified services to Gnome?  I can see us
spending a lot of time implementing services which, while useful to
Gnome, will also include a lot of stuff we don't care about (e.g., is
any Gnome program really going to be hurt if we only have Push event
channels and not Pull channels?).  On the other hand, these services
are standardized.

To me, it isn't clear what the standardization really gains us.  It's
not like there is a large body of applications that we can drop into
our framework.  My opinion is that if we're going to be writing all of
the infrastructure anyway, we might as well write what we really need.


I suppose one might argue that the OMG designs are complicated because
they must be, for reasons that aren't immediately apparent.  I wish
the specs included rationales for the choices they've made.


I'm curious to know what others think about this.

Tom