Re: comments and questions

[Jim Pick <jim jimpick com>]

Jason Gilbert <jason@scott.net> writes:

> First thing, I liked to complement whomever worked on the new website.
> It looks fantastic.  I think it would be nice if the background image
> is included w/ gnome so their would be at least one background in the
> background properties dialog.  It's also a really slick looking
> background;^)
> 
> I also had a few questions:
> 
> 1)  Has a decision been made on an ORB, if not, of the people working w/
> CORBA stuff, which ORBs are they using?

I think it's still pretty much up in the air.

Most people seem to be zeroing in on mico, since it has a fairly
full set of features.

Philip Dawes suggested using both mico and omniorb (because it has
better stub-style invocation facilities).  Theoretically, with IIOP,
we can mix-and-match.

ILU was initially favoured, because it has lots of language bindings.
But it's license has a small wording problem, that Xerox probably
doesn't want to fix.  It's also lacking dynamic invocation facilities,
which I think we want.
 
> 2)  Has any thought been given to designing a Component Object
> Specification similar to JavaBeans.  Just a simple standard way for
> Objects to be defined.

I think we're on our way.

I've been perusing the specs for OpenDoc, and OLE (I haven't poured
over JavaBeans yet) - and I think we've got a lot of the raw material
already in place.  It's worth pointing out that the vast majority of
the contents of those specs deal with issues that are already
addressed by CORBA, X Windows, Gtk, drag and drop protocols, etc.
Many of those specs also deal with "conventions" of how to do UI
stuff, etc.

Much of the component architecture (document types, for example) has
been implemented many times in existing monolithic free software
applications.  Many of the existing editors (like emacs), mail
readers, web browsers, file managers (like Midnight Commander),
etc. already have a component-like approach to doing things.  We just
have to work at generalizing the code.

I'd definitely recommend checking out Owen Taylor's plugsocket code -
that's very cool.

Tom Tromey has also done a lot of work on session management too.

Cheers,

 - Jim

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