RE: Current status of GtkPlug/GtkSocket and plans for the future

["Vallone, Anthony" <anthony vallone lmco com>]

I am using GtkPlug/GtkSocket on a large space system program.  It turned
out to be incredibly useful to us.  We have a docked window at the top
of the screen that displays a summary of system status.  This docked
window has four GtkSockets that are plugged by four other applications.
Doing it this way made it easy for us to decrease coupling between the
docked window and the other applications that generate the summary
information because the docked window doesn't need to know about any of
the information that is controlled by the other applications.

-Anthony Vallone

-----Original Message-----
From: gtk-list-bounces gnome org [mailto:gtk-list-bounces gnome org] On
Behalf Of Alexandre Franke
Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2009 12:25 PM
To: gtk-list gnome org
Subject: Current status of GtkPlug/GtkSocket and plans for the future

Hi,

I am a planner developper, currently doing technical writing for a
customer (in a chapter about GNOME).
I recently discovered GtkPlug/GtkSocket and I have a few questions to
ask before I talk about it in the book.

1 - Has GtkPlug/GtkSocket really been accepted in the GNOME landscape?
How much is it used? I took a quick look on Google code search and
couldn't really find many applications using it.

2 - Could it somehow replace Bonobo? If the answer is no, I would
appreciate if someone could make it clear what GtkPlug/GtkSocket lacks
that Bonobo provides.

3 - I understand that at the time it was written, DBus was maybe not
there yet, but now, wouldn't it be a good idea to follow the trend and
port it to DBus and get rid of XEmbed to gain portability by removing
the dependancy towards the X Window system?

4 - An in-process approach for components could prove very efficient.
Instead of trying to do IPC (via Corba, DBus, XEmbed, etc), what about
simple calls to a shared library?

5 - I got the impression that GtkPlug/GtkSocket is intended for
embedding components between two threads of the same application
(written by the same developper), not between two different
applications that know very few about each other. Is that correct?

6 - What about interoperability with: OLE (microsoft), KParts (KDE),
UNO (OpenOffice.org)?

I guess that most of the answers to these questions will be "you're on
the wrong track" or "it's not that easy" but as a newbie on this
topic, I'd be very interested to have explanations on why things can't
be done or what I didn't understand (or find enough information on).

Thanks for your time and patience.

-- 
Alexandre Franke
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