Re: Scripting in Gnome

[jamie <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 15:30, Bill Haneman wrote:

> >>
> >
> >I was thinking along the lines of having XML as the high level
> >definition. That could then be translated via XSLT to IDL if you needed
> >it. I'm not saying scrap corba completely cause we do need it for
> >backwards comatibility. If you look at the way MS is heading - its
> >effectively using xml and web services to replace IDL in .Net
> >
> 
> That doesn't make it a good idea ;-)
> 
> Making the XML the 'high level' definition stands the whole business on 
> its head.  IDL was designed to express interfaces, XML is a very poor 
> fit for this.  The fact that it would junk existing GNOME service 
> definitions is the real stopper though, IMO.

I was suggesting a future bonobo implementation that could make use of
several back ends including the existing corba one. Therefore existing
apps would not be broken. New apps that required corba features like
network and platform transparancy would still get it if they needed it.
However a new widget that used bonobo and did not require corba could
then use an alternate (and faster) back end like D-Bus. The choice of
back-end could be left to the app.

I suggest XMl as a high level wrapper for a high level interface. If you
want to bypass the higher level and use a lower level interface like IDL
then that should be fine too.

To clarify, I am in no way suggesting anything that would break or make
incompatible existing code.


jamie.



> 
> Also - XSLT is powerful, but not all-powerful.  Some things are very 
> hard to express via XSLT transformations.  Lastly, IDL is very human 
> readable, which XML is most certainly not (at least, nontrivial XML 
> interface definitions are not!).
> 
> - Bill
> 
> >
> >jamie.
> >
> 
>