Re: ANNOUNCE: gEdit 0.4.5

[Evan Lawrence <evan worldpath net>]

On 25-Jul-98 Todd Graham Lewis wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Jul 1998, Evan Lawrence wrote:
> 
>>         * The beginnings of a Plugins API - this will allow the core of
>>         gEdit
>>           to stay small and flexible, but still be able to offer a limitless
>>           number of features. The API is being developed in parallel with
>>           Chris
>>           Lahey's text editor/word processor GO
>>           (http://www-personal.umich.edu/~clahey/software/) and currently
>>           includes an email plugin, an encryption plugin, an interface to
>>           diff
>>           (cvs and stand-alone) and some other demonstration plugins.
>>           Developers
>>           are encouraged to suggest enhancements in the API, and to
>>           contribute
>>           plugins.
> 
> Hey, cool!  Are you doing this using CORBA?  That would allow
> people to write plugins in any language, and for them to be easily
> network-transparent.  This is really the sort of thing that CORBA was
> made for...

The API isn't currently being implemented using CORBA, instead we're using a
method similar to how the gimp's plugins work. The reasons we chose not to use
CORBA for the API are 1) when we (mostly Chris) started working on the API, it
wasn't really clear what ORB gnome was going with, 2) gEdit supports both gnome
and non-gnome, and tries to be fairly minimalistic in its requirements: for
gnome of course this wouldn't be a problem, since most people using gnome have
some ORB installed, but for the gtk-only version saying "You have to get mico
or ORBit to use plugins" would probably scare away a lot of the people who use
gEdit for quick editting jobs... Technically, it would probably be possible to,
in the future, implement the plugins so they can use CORBA and our current way
of doing it with pipes for the gnome version, and just our current method for
the gtk only version, but for right now we're still working out what should be
in the API, how much control it should provide, and then actually writing the
code to extend it - I can definitely see adding CORBA support at some point in
the future though...

--
Evan Lawrence