Re: GNOME CVS: gnome-core mmclouglin

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 28Nov2001 01:21PM (+0100), Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> 
> having remote components would be so good for GNOME, that I can't see
> why there's even a discussion about it :-) As I say, if I have remote
> components, I can do a lot of nice things for a lot of office
> environments.

While distributed applications are nice, I don't think the component
model is necessarily the best layer for solving these kinds of
problems. An application-specific client-server model using a more
lightweight protocol like SOAP instead of relying on X and CORBA.

Examples:

* Instead of running your addressbook on your iPAQ displaying to your
desktop, wouldn't you rather have both your iPAQ and your desktop
both talk to a network server that manages your addressbook info and
arbitrates concurrent access?

* Instead of running a load applet on your server and displaying to
your desktop, why not have a load monitoring system that separates
the monitoring part, which runs on the server, from the GUI, which
runs on any other machine and connects at any time (perhaps even from
multiple machines at once) with suitable authentication credentials?

Anyway, while the idea of remote components is interesting, in
practice the network is _not_ transparent. It has high latency, it has
low bandwidth, and it goes down all the time. To get robustness and
decent performance, you are better off using protocols that can cope
with this non-idea behavior.

GNOME should aim to make it easier to develop networked client-server
applications instead of relying on heavyweight RPC or remote display
hacks. Support for SOAP and associated protocols is a step in the
right direction.

> I wish I had the knowledge and the time to just provide the patch to
> bonobo-activation for supporting remote components and have this thread
> end :-(

The thread was really only about icons for remote components, not
necessarily remote components in general (which are not impossible to
use currently, but not totally transparent either.

Regards,

Maciej