Exactly. This was what I was talking about when I suggested making GObject's self describing. a GObject could then be introspected by CORBA, DBus, Python, Whatever to allow the scripting functionality easily. I think GObject's properties are self describing currently but methods are not. Anyone know what else would need to be described to make this possible? On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 19:57, James Henstridge wrote: > On 5/02/2004 11:06 AM, jamie wrote: > > > Sounds very promising. The examples were interesting because thats the > > > >kind of stuff im interested in too. I was thinking more on the way VBA > >does things - It has application specific objects which provide a nice > >clean object interface to scriptable stuff in an application so i would > >want to replicate that and also allow a macro to interact with other > >apps in the same way ( the object interface would of course hideaway the > >bonobo calls and other glue that AT-SPI uses). Its good stuff - strange > >that it was hidden away, you should definitely talk it up a bit more... > > > > > What you mention here is not a feature of VBA. Instead, the feature is > that pretty much every non-trivial Windows app exposes APIs via the same > scripting interface (COM). VBA (and Jscript and Python and Perl and > ...) have a binding for this scripting interface, which essentially > gives them the ability to script these applications for free. This is > possible because COM provides an introspection interface, so the VBA > interpreter can find out what methods exist on an object, and how to > invoke them. > > If the majority of apps on the Gnome desktop exposed their object model > via CORBA, then a CORBA binding for a scripting language would give > similar benefits to VBA's COM glue code (and if most apps exposed the > document model via dbus or dcop, then a dbus or dcop binding would > provide those benefits). > > Following on from this, you can probably see that choosing a language is > a very small part of making "Scripting in Gnome" work. The hard part is > getting all the applications to support it. > > For the Linux desktop, this is particularly hard because it isn't clear > which scripting interface should be used. > > * For Gnome, the answer would probably have been CORBA a few years > back (this is less clear cut these days). > * For KDE, the obvious answer is DCOP. > * For Mozilla, components are exposed in process to Javascript via > XPConnect. They don't have an out of process interface. > * I think OpenOffice also has something similar to Bonobo or XPConnect > > The language support for each of these different solutions is different, > so a developer's choice of interface will affect who can actually use > it. Maybe in the future dbus will fill the role of "the scripting > interface for the linux desktop", but it isn't quite ready for prime > time yet (as far as I know). > > James. -- Bob Smith <bob thestuff net>
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