Baboonifying GtkSpell - proposal for a spell checker corba object (was Re: Your gEdit modifications)

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Sorry, I was working hard the last two weeks to buy a new hard disk so
I had no time to answer your mail more quickly ...

On Sun, 8 Nov 1998, Martin Wahlen wrote:

> Hi there, I thought i'd ask you about baboonifying gEdit. Since I see that
> you have added some of the code to do CORBA stuff in gEdit I thought hey,
> why not export the entire thing through CORBA. That way we can get rid of
> gtkspell from libgnomeui and make it a proper corba object. 

How exactly does this work - gtkspell from libgnomeui is only a dialog
wraper for ispell and the spell plugin from gEdit is using this dialog - 
or do I miss something ?

Well, it we want to baboonify this I think this is not only an issue for
gEdit but for Gnome in general - other applications may like to use spell
checking as well. So what about making a general `gnome-spell' corba
server which handles spell checking (and probably move this corba server
into gnome-core where it IMHO belongs).

This corba server should only handle ``low-level'' requests (check
word/text, insert word into dictionary ...) but not have a GUI. We can
then use this corba server as a proper corba object in gEdit, perhaps
also as a plugin. But this plugin won't pop up a dialog but for instance
add itself to the main menu, display messages in the status bar ...

Perhaps we can also keep gtkspell in libgnomeui but make it use this
new corba server ...

> I have no experience with CORBA, but do you think that it would be hard to
> implement this? Perhaps it should realy be a three tier thing eg.

Well, it's not so hard to add CORBA to gEdit - most work is inventing a
good interface.

And I think my gmodule plugins are a good starting point for this - it
was my plan to extend those plugins so they'll be able to add themselves
to the menu and toolbar, write messages to the status bar etc ...

The `laucher_plugin' already exports some of the functionality of this
gmodule plugins through CORBA, and it's possible to either extend this
plugin or move it into gEdit - I'd prefer the second one, so gEdit would
be a true CORBA server.

> Spellcheckerobject <-> Gui <-> Editor? And have both the backend
> spellchecker and the editor speak CORBA? Well, do you know what it would
> take? 

As already noted above, I think we should first make a spellchecker
backend / corba server. This is some point for Gnome in general and
perhaps we should have this in gnome-core so all applications can use
it not just gEdit.

Then, there's some need for a GUI for this spellcheckerobject - do you
know where gtkspell from libgnomeui is currently used ? I think we can
keep this dialog but just make it use the corba server instead of calling
ispell directly - well *the* corba server, we can even have more of them,
one for ispell, one for some other spelling program, one for ...

And finally, gEdit. For the spell checking, gEdit does not need to be
a corba server itself - it only needs to "speek" CORBA, thus using the
spellchecker corba object - or the GUI for it.

Martin

-----------------------------------------------------------------
   Martin Baulig - Angewandte Mathematik - Universitaet Trier
   martin@home-of-linux.org, http://www.home-of-linux.org/
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