Discovering services

[Jamie McCracken]

Tako Schotanus wrote:

> Maybe Jamie was right and I've misinterpreted what this thread was 
> about: weren't we discussing how to solve the problem of getting the 
> introspection data for unactivated services?
> 

Nope you did not misinterpret this thread as a whole but there are 
several issues (some of them arguably orthogonal).

To sum up, here is my understanding:

1) You should not have to activate a service simply to get introspection 
data.

2) Introspection data should be made available in a file in a known 
location so that apps can read these directly if they prefer. (perhaps 
the service file can contain a file path to their introspection file?)

3) Orthogonal issue : Static vs Dynamic languages. Static languages need 
a more COM like approach with code generated from IDL whilst dynamic 
stuff can auto generate the IDL in their bindings. There is not an issue 
  here that prevents static interface data from being made available in 
a file in either case.

4) None of the interfaces should be dynamically changing at runtime (if 
they are then its really bad programming practice as you will get race 
conditions IE if you introspect an interface at runtime it could have 
changed again before you have had a chance to call a method). Thats not 
to say object instances wont change at runtime of course.



-- 
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/