plugin API, was Re: Glade/Gtk-- design proposals (longish)

[Christof Petig <christof petig wtal de>]

James Dean Palmer wrote:

> Christof Petig <christof.petig@wtal.de> writes:
>
> > Yesterday I told Damon, that I can't wait to see glade output a source
> > file. I offered doing the gtk-- wrapper for glade.
>
> Well..  If there were some sort of API in Glade to traverse the
> widget structure as it exists in memory you could write it as a plugin.
> Of course someone would have to write a plugin API for Glade, but this
> would let you write your interpretter module completely in c++, and merely
> referencing the c plugin API.  This avoids code duplication (no need to use
> the XML code); the code is completely independent; changes in the module don't
> effect Glade (as long as the API is sound); you can write the module in
> your favorite language (c++, perl, python, lisp, etc..) as long as you can
> get a binding to the plugin API.  There's a lot of nice tools to help make
> these bindings possible too.
>
> Actually there's some other interesting possibilities for using
> plugins other than as "code writers", too...
>
> Just a few thoughts..
>
> James Dean Palmer

  Thank you for this excellent proposal. Do you know of any existing GPL (or
source available) project which implements such an inter language (and of course
inter-process) API?

Just calling another program with command line options would not work since you
have an interdependance of the widget (C++) code (include, several widgets in one
file).

Besides that I want to traverse the widget tree leaf first - that's important.

Regards
     Christof