Re: [Tracker] From the client side

[Jamie McCracken <jamie mccrack googlemail com>]

On Mon, 2008-11-24 at 14:35 +0000, Martyn Russell wrote:

> > in near future I hope to have a direct access client to trackers sqlite
> > db to avoid dbus overhead
>
> My thought on this at the moment is that if this is needed then either 
> the application developer is doing something drastically wrong or the 
> client interface over DBus is just not good enough. I tend to think the 
> later is the current problem given my recent application experiences 
> using libtracker.
>
> As for DBus overhead. I really don't think that overhead is going to be 
> noticeable. There is only so much information a user can process at once 
> on the screen and it isn't going to be faster than tracker + DBus 
> overhead. If the application and client experience with tracker is done 
> correctly, it should be smooth.
>
> This highly depends on a number of factors of course.

this is true if apps use tracker as a conventional client/server system
where client is thin and only requests data on a need to know basis

In reality apps like RhythmBox are thick clients and tend to load all
data into memory. They are agnostic about where the data comes from and
are not designed/optimised for purely client/server access

Question is do we fix the apps or make tracker flexible enough to work
with both thin and thick clients?

My feeling is that its more work to fix the apps

jamie