Re: [Kde-accessibility] Proklam and KMouth

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Mon, 2002-09-23 at 18:35, Pupeno wrote:
...
> >
> > If you prefer not to use gnome-speech's implementation directly, I would
> > still urge you and/or Proklam to use its APIs, which are defined in IDL;
> > this would ensure that the systems would interoperate correctly with
> > each other.
> > I believe that having a Proklam back-end for gnome-speech would make
> > more sense than vice-versa, since gnome-speech is a cross-process API
> > which is currently exported vi CORBA.

> When KDE made the biggest jump of all... from KDE 1.0 to KDE 2.0 (well, we 
> could say that from KDE 0.0 (nonexistance) to KDE 1.0 there was a bigger 
> jump), one of the things in questions where the use of CORBA, I wasn't 
> arround KDE development in that time but I think it was a hard desition to 
> make... continue to use Corba being compatible with the rest of the world, or 
> develop a particular protocol, beining incompatible, but developing a better 
> desktop.
> They choosed the second option and dcop was developed, dcop standands for 
> Desktop COmunication Protocol and it's designed to easy the comunication 
> between applications. So, corba was droped and not used any longer. Of 
> course, a KDE application can still use Corba, but a KDE service should not 
> office the service with Corba, but with DCOP.

Hi Pupeno:

I am familiar with DCOP.  In fact in the early days of the GNU/GNOME
Accessibility Project we discussed using DCOP for our IPC.  However, as
you infer in your message below, DCOP has some real limitations where
object-oriented services are concerned, and we concluded that for that
and other reasons, DCOP was not a good fit for our needs, it did not
provide the necessary level of abstraction.

Therefore it is not clear to me that it would be feasible to provide a
conversion or bridging service from DCOP to AT-API, but we would
certainly welcome any attempts to provide it.  It does make sense to use
a toolkit's native APIs and constructions, but of course only if they
can do the job ;-)

> That's why I'm building Proklam, with a DCOP interface despite that Gnome may 
> provide the same solution with a Corba interface. But as sending dcop 
> messages is not friendly enough, I think, an API class called KSpeech will be 
> provided inside kdelibs somewhere to make it even easier.
> So, to use Prokla, you won't have to know anything about Corba (which I don't 
> know), or DCOP (which I didn't know untill I started Proklam)... just 
> instantiate KSpeech and use it.

I am wondering still if KSpeech can re-use gnome-speech's IDL.  That
doesn't necessarily mean it has to use CORBA, but only that its APIs map
directly onto those of gnome-speech.  If they do, they it would be
fairly easy to write wrappers from one to the other, thus allowing KDE,
GNOME, Java, and other GNU/Linux platforms and toolkits to reuse the
maximum number of speech drivers.  The resulting similarity of APIs
would also mean that porting "talking programs" from one platform or set
of libraries to another would be much easier, whereas with different
APIs it can be too difficult to seem worthwhile to a developer with
limited time.
 
> DCOP is not a KDE only system and can be used by any other desktop enviroment 
> or anything needing a comunication system, but I think that the only one 
> using it is KDE and it will remain that way for a while I thik.

If you or anyone else on the list is interested in a DCOP-to-AT-SPI
bridge, or in reusing our IDL as a means of defining the KSpeech API, I
would be happy to help.

Best regards,

Bill Haneman

> Thank you.
> - -- 
> Pupeno: pupeno pupeno com
> http://www.pupeno.com
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