Re: my shortlist of GNOME wishes

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

"Michael D. James" wrote:
> 
> If this is an appropriate topic I'll throw in my own two cents.  The
> worst thing about most GUI environments is they don't lend themselves
> to scripting.
> 
> Computers were supposed to help us automate things.  But on PCs I find
> myself doing a lot of manual repetitive tasks because I'm pointing and
> clicking instead of typing textual commands which could be put into a
> script.

Believe it or not, Microsoft is actually making headway on this
problem.  Between COM and the new Windows Scripting Host technologies,
it's possible to write a script in Your Favorite Language (providing it
supports WSH -- Perl, VB and JavaScript work, at the least) to control
Windows programs.

The problems with this model are two:

1. The Windows program in question must expose its APIs via COM, so that
WSH can see them.

2. Said APIs have to be documented, and the documentation made
available.  (It doesn't do any good to expose your program's
functionality and then charge $700 for an SDK -- not exactly a
brand-building move.)

A bonus third problem is that COM is a brain-bender.  ;->  (Though, in
all fairness, Microsoft is adding layers to fix this: WSH, COM+, ATL,
VB, etc.)

To drag this back on topic, GNOME has some beginnings towards a similar
setup: CORBA is implemented (ORBit).  What we lack now are language
bindings (AFAIK, you can only use ORBit via C at the moment) and a lack
of apps exposing their functionality via CORBA.  Once the latter is
taken care of, we'd be where MS is now: we'd need to document these
interfaces and give the info away.

We should try to go one-better, though.  It might be worth thinking
about some standard interfaces.  In the COM world, everyone makes up
their own interfaces willy-nilly.  It'd be nice to have, say, a "menu"
interface for walking a program's menu, to make UI macros easier to
write.  We could even make the gnome library implement that interface
automatically, so that all GNOME programs with a menu support at least
that much scriptability.

Just some vague thoughts,
-- 
= Warren Young, maintainer of the Winsock Programmer's FAQ at:
=     http://www.cyberport.com/~tangent/programming/winsock/
=
= ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m