Re: Scripting in Gnome

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 10:45, jamie wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-02-05 at 15:30, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > 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.

What makes you think D-Bus is any faster than CORBA?  We already have
one backend that does everything we need it to already, so why do we
need alternatives?  What advantages do we get for all that extra
development time and complexity?  What about the fact that apps would
then no longer inter-operate because some would use backend A and others
use backend B?

> 
> 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.

Your fetish for XML is getting almost humorous.  ;-)  Nothing about XML
makes it "higher level" than IDL.  XML is basically nothing more than a
low-level specification for a file syntax.  Using XML would require you
to write a new document type for IDL-ish purposes, implement tools to
duplicate what IDL already does, etc.  That time you'll waste for no
reason, both your time and the time of the programmers who have to learn
this new XML document type and tools.  XML isn't necessarily a bad tool
for the job (I use it for precisely this purpose in AweMUD), but it just
isn't as appropriate as the tool GNOME already has.

Unless there is a very specific reason to duplicate/reimplement that
work, quit worrying about whether it's XML or not and just use what we
already have, what programmers are already familiar with, and what has
been designed specifically for the task at hand.
-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.