Re: [Tracker] Discussing the API of libtracker-miner

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 12:00 +0100, Martyn Russell wrote:
> On 17/08/09 19:00, Adrien Bustany wrote:

> > Currently, this lib includes a miner skeleton, and monitoring
> > functions. The idea would be to include more features in this lib,
> > merging the work I did for my gsoc project.
>
> That sounds great.
>
> I should add, I have taken a look at your work and it looks good, but I 
> think we will be writing the miner API in C and can probably provide a 
> vala binding for it. We want people to be able to write miners in 
> whatever language they want and C is most portable for this. Also, we 
> have a large portion of the work done in C already of course.

I already explained on IRC.

But with Vala you get maximum language flexibility:

The valac compiler will generate a .c and a .h file, so it gives you the
exact same flexibility than a manual .h and a manual .c would give you.

On top of that will valac for-free make you a .gir file, meaning that
you get the gobject-introspection stuff for free. This means that
JavaScript, Python and other language bindings that support GIR, for
this piece of the API, will be automatic.

We have already done this in tracker-store's libtracker-common, by the
way: tracker-sparql-builder.vala is supposed to become public API soon.

JÃrg is also working on a new Turtle/Trig parser written in Vala that
will expose a public API too. In the same way.

And when we will allow access to the database directly, over a SPARQL
bridge, then the SPARQL bits and pieces that are now written in Vala
will also be publicly accessible in libtracker-data, in the same way.


I think it's fine if Adrien continues developing these pieces of library
code in Vala.


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Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
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