Re: RFC: GProxy, Dynamic Method Invocation

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2008/7/2 Michael Lawrence <mflawren fhcrc org>:
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 1, 2008 at 3:08 PM, Johan Dahlin <jdahlin async com br> wrote:
>>
>> Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen wrote:
>> [..]
>>>
>>>  * Relation to GObject-introspection. As far as I can tell GProxy and
>>> GObject-introspection are two completely different things. Maybe I do
>>> not understand the implications of GObject introspection fully?
>>
>> No, they are actually related
>> You should check the libgirepository API which is backed up by a binary
>> typelib.
>
> The main thing that seems to be missing from libgirepository's dynamic
> invocation, relative to the "GProxy" proposal, is cross-language support.
> Currently, it seems libgirepository only supports invocation of C functions
> via libffi. What about just basing that on GClosure instead, with a libffi
> implementation of GClosure (I think one already exists)?

There are several other things, for example async methods. This is a
must if you want to call web services, dbus, or other.

As stated on the page it is a design goal to not depend on anything
but glib. And with the architecture I've laid out I don't see any need
to depend on libffi. The individual GModules exposing GProxyTransports
are free to do this but frankly I don't see any need for them to do so
either. Java will use JNI, Python libpython, DBus will use libdbus (or
maybe dbus-glib), xml-rpc, soap, etc will probably use other means as
well.

Cheers,
Mikkel