Re: EggDBus

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2008/12/22 David Zeuthen <david fubar dk>

On Mon, 2008-12-22 at 11:29 -0500, Dan Winship wrote:
> David Zeuthen wrote:
> > This mail is already too long but there's one more thing.
>
> Yeah. Still digesting. But...
>
> I have not done all that much with D-Bus, but one thing I noticed while
> doing the libsoup 2.4 API rewrite was that, at a very high level, D-Bus
> and XML-RPC are fairly similar, and so it would be neat if the code for
> connecting to or implementing an XML-RPC service with libsoup could use
> the same idioms as the code for connecting to or implementing a D-Bus
> service, rather than presenting more-or-less the same concepts to the
> developer in a completely different way. (And of course, using
> standardized idioms makes it easier to make bindings of the code.)

Oh, it's funny you mention XML-RPC. In a previous life I did a lot of
XML-RPC work including writing my own multi-threaded XML-RPC server in c
++.

FWIW, I've had this item for a while on the TODO list

 o  Very little of the core functionality is related to D-Bus; would
   it be useful to have EggIpcProxy, EggIpcConnection, EggIpcMessage,
   EggIpcMethodInvocation GInterfaces that all generated code uses?

   Then the existing EggDBus* classes simply implement these interfaces
   and the wrappers could be used with, say EggXmlRpc* or EggSoap
   implementations too.

   Maybe this is just the Architecture Astronaut talking.

However, I made a decision early on to just focus on D-Bus, mostly
because adding another layer of abstraction and indirection would take
my eyes off the ball. And also a concern that it would make it harder to
get buy-in for getting stuff like this into the core library stack (I'm
sometimes accused of being an architecture astronaut :-).

Hehe, I think it would be stretch to call you that. After all you do produce tonnes of code :-)

I a while ago I started hacking on a generic dynamic method invocation framework for glib: http://live.gnome.org/MikkelKamstrup/GProxyIdea, mailing list thread: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2008-July/msg00006.html. As of writing I have not got past writing the stub/boilerplate GObjects as my spare time is extremely limited. I am most delighted to see the progress you have made :-)

My idea was to do something like Java's Proxy class: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/ which should then be used to dynamically build interfaces. Interfaces could fx. be build on the fly from a WSDL or something (the main thing missing for this in GLib is dynamic method introspection (gobject-introspection lacks the dynamic part as far as I know)).

Anyway if you read through my GProxyIdea page you should see that you might not be the only one being worthy of the "architecture astronaut" label :-)


One thing though... I am not completely able to grasp the relation of EggDBus to GObject-Introspection... I would hope that they could be highly integrated so that I could dynamically export an introspectable GObjector something like that.

-- 
Cheers,
Mikkel