Re: CORBA based persistence engine

[Kero van Gelder <gelderk natlab research philips com>]

> > The thing starts becoming interesting, when you start to save  
> > collections
> > of objects. Imagine you have a whole dialog, with checkboxes, buttons, 
> > a tabbed notebook and some pixmaps. You simply tell the dialog "save 
> > yourself to that file", and later you are able to restore the dialog, 
> > including all connections between the objects, all texts and pixmaps. 

And opened files? It's no problem to save the dialog, but the dialog
was not on its own, it was part of something bigger; do you want to
save that all?

[snip dialog editor]

> > The thing starts becoming nice (but a little tricky), when not only the 
> > dialogs of your application are managed that way, but - when its really 
> > good - every control of your application. The user is now able to add 
> > new menu items, change the look of your application, in certain limits 
> > even the "workflow".

Also have a look at my posting
  http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gnome-gui-list/1998-November/0079.html

[snip nib]

[snip toolkit idea]

> This is a very appealing concept, but I don't know how it could be  
> done to support the different language bindings of each toolkit (e.g.  
> how to you unserialize into a C application?  Could be done, but the  
> code would probably be kinda tricky).

By serializing the look'n'feel only. That part is handled by the WM
and Gnome libraries, which can be adapted from our side to support it.
The applications just use that library.

Hey, it would be great if to _any_ application I could say ``Save
yourself'', because I'll continue next week. But may be we'll have to
wait for a wide-spread OOOS (Object Oriented Operating System) for
that.

Bye!

+--- Kero ------------------ kero@dds.nl ---+
| I ain't changed,                          |
| but I know I ain't the same               |
+--- M38C --- http://huizen.dds.nl/~kero ---+