ANNOUNCE: First bonobomm tarball

[murrayc t-online de (Murray Cumming)]

*** libbonobouimm 

bonobomm work is finally underway. Here is a first tarball of
libbonobouimm, which provided c++ interfaces to libbonoboui: 
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/gtkmm/libbonobouimm-1.3.0.tar.gz

This code is in cvs.gnome.org, in gnomemm/libbonobouimm. 

So far we have a working C++ version of the bonoboui_hello example. I
think it's much nicer than the C original. 

*** Requirements 

This requires the cpp branch of ORBit2. 
You can get that like so: 
cvs co -r cpp ORBit2.

The cpp branch of ORBit2 is just-good-enough to be used with simple
Bonobo stuff. The mappings for more complex CORBA interfaces and
structures are being worked out properly in the orbit-cpp-cactus branch.
However, that branch is probably not able to compile all of Bonobo.idl.

You will also need the latest gtkmm-1.3.x 

*** What is libbonobouimm? 

It's not easy to do CORBA in C, so libbonobo* has lots of sugar code to
make life easier. But this just hides the underlying architecture so
it's hard to understand what's really happening. And this seems to have
encouraged a general swampy disorganization within the libbonobo*
libraries. We intend to make these interfaces clearer by separating the
different types of interfaces provided by Bonobo: 

Here is an explanation of what is in each directory: 

- bonobomm/generated: 
  #include <bonobomm/generated/Bonobo.h> 
  and 
  ::Bonobo::UIContainer 

  pre-generated CORBA stubs and skels. We need to share one set of 
  generated CORBA code so that different libraries don't have duplicate 
  symbols when using the same CORBA interfaces, and so that we can use 
  generated types in library interfaces. libbonobo* does the same thing 
  for C stubs/skels. 

- bonobomm/widgets: 
  #include <bonobomm/widgets/bonobowindow.h> 
  and 
  Gnome::Bonobo::Window 

  Bonobo contains lots of GTK-type widgets which have only a loose 
  association with anything CORBA. 

In future we expect to have something like this, when we think of a
better directory name, and when we are sure what needs to go in it: 

bonobomm/server_helpers (We need a better name) 
  #include <bonobmm/server_helpers/uicomponent_easyimpl.h> 
  and 
  Bonobomm::ServerHelpers::UIComponent_EasyImpl 

This stuff will become clearer as we create more examples which test out
the various fun things that can be done with Bonobo. You can see one of
these classes - UICompnent_EasyImpl - in the hello example. The idea is
to make easier to implement some CORBA server interfaces. Some of these
might wrap the GObject-style server implementations in libbonobo*. 

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc usa net
www.murrayc.com