Re: Pipes

[Michael ROGERS <M Rogers cs ucl ac uk>]

>It would be very easy to implement some kind of standard "pipe" interface via 
>the ORB -- but there's a basic conceptual issue involved, which is this.  How 
>is it meaningful to "pipe" between two interactive, event-driven GUI 
>applications.  A pipe is very useful for batch-mode, filter style 
>applications, where you can chain the output of one to the next, but is much 
>less meaningful for an interactive application.

 Perhaps the command-line pipe is too limiting a concept - what I'm talking
about is a way for the user to specify different types of connections 
between components, to assemble an application. The idea of plugging together 
a word processor, a spelling checker and a printer applet via CORBA is 
fantastic, but we need an intuitive way to specify these connections. Maybe 
this comes down to individual solutions for each application, but some kind 
of standard "visual syntax" for grouping components would be useful. The
smarter Gnome is at identifying what components do and what types of data
they can handle, the more intuitive this can be.


Michael Rogers