Re: [g-a-devel] Standardization and Interoperability Statement of Intent

[Olaf Jan Schmidt <ojschmidt kde org>]

Hi!

[Aditya Pandey]
> This is a welcome statement of intent. But it leaves doubts on what exactly
> is the roadmap (implementation), as in bonobo is either dead or dying, so
> what happens to the implementation...is the accessibility code being
> changed for D-BUS.

The intention of KDE is clearly to move AT-SPI onto D-BUS. GNOME might then 
either choose to also move to DBUS by reimplementing ATK and the Java 
Accessibility API, or to help us write a bridge between the two variants of 
AT-SPI instead.

At the FSG Accessibility meeting in Hawaii last January, we discussed possible 
obstacles to a DBUS approach, and the only objection left was that it is 
currently not in wide enough use to know how stable it is. My impression 
using older versions of AT-SPI was that it was also not really stable, but I 
don't know whether this was a problem with the RPC or with the assistive 
technologies. Anyway, Bill and Peter assured me that the vast majority of 
these problem have been fixed in recent months.

Other mentioned points were network trancparency (possible with DBUS, but I 
don't know of any uses of it yet) and reference counting (necessary for CORBA 
only; it can be emulated in the DBUS bindings and obsoleted at a later 
point).

Olaf