Re: [Tracker] Can i directly use Tracker API with application

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On Mon, 2010-05-24 at 13:59 +0200, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> On Mon, 2010-05-24 at 13:56 +0200, Alexandre Mazari wrote:
> > Hi Ivan,
> > > You can call tracker without any special registration. We provide  
> > > libtracker-client as a convenience for C developers (and our command  
> > > line tools), wrapping some DBus code and encoding help functions.
> > > So, if your application is in C, use libtracker-client. If it is in  
> > > vala or python or other languages with easier DBus integration, go  
> > > for the DBus API.
> >
> > Even in higher level languages, it would be great to be able to use  
> > the commodities provided by tracker-client and use DBus transparently.
> > My current use case is making a tracker frontend using SeedKit. based  
> > on one of the many existing web-based semantic/linked-data browsers.
> > This could be achieved for most bindings by making tracker-client g- 
> > instrospectable, is there any effort in this direction ? Would patches  
> > be welcomed ?
>
> Yes
>
> >  From what I understand your are investigating a direct access to  
> > Tracker with your own binary IPC/RMI protocol, tracker-client could  
> > hide that transition to client apps developers, being in C or  higher  
> > level languages.
>
> Agree. But if we do provide a custom IPC method, then it'll probably
> still be possible to continue using the old over-DBus less fast
> SparqlQuery.
>
> You can look here how it might look (DBus object is called
> TrackerSteroids in this experiment). Note the "experiment" in the branch
> name. No promises if you start working with this!
>
> http://git.gnome.org/browse/tracker/log/?h=dbus-fd-experiment

Note, unless there are serious advantages to not using D-Bus, I wouldn't
advocate this. D-Bus is quite well known and people know how to use it.
Creating our own IPC also has the added risk of being error prone (until
stabilised), lacking security features and tested much less than D-Bus.

-- 
Regards,
Martyn