Re: [gnome-love] what if data files were active objects ?

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Sun, Apr 28, 2002 at 07:08:12PM +0200, Benoit Rouits wrote:
> HELO,
> I just wondered this night why user data files are still passive 
> files in GNOME.
> Here are some ways of reflection:
> bonobo provides us a way to see a component quite like an object but the
> component just have methods to handle some data which is actually separated
> to the component. A good thing for GNOME would be to provide standards bonobo
> component (not particularly graphic) to handle any of classic type of files,
> with a common interface for a common data structure.
> E.G: 'word document' would have the same methods whatever its raw data format
> (pdf,TeX,rtf,abw...)
> Yes, it is idealistic, but it is just to encourage us to make more reusable
> code, such that applications could delegate some work. Also, a contextual
> menu of a graphic representation of a file could just call the bonobo
> methods to its type. Of course, one have to define a stable class hirearchy
> to handle any kind of document structure.

OS/2 WPS was like this. However, it was built on SOM while Bonobo is based on
COM (afaik), so I don't know how well Bonobo would support such a thing.

Here's a description of the WPS DataFile object:
  http://www.warpspeed.com.au/cgi-bin/inf2html.cmd?..\html\book\Toolkt40\WPS1.INF+29

The rest of the docs are here:
  http://www.warpspeed.com.au/book/books.htm

OpenDoc also was built on SOM, btw.

Cheers,
Greg Merchan