[ghns] Renewed collaboration among data sharing frameworks

[Sebastian Pösterl]

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Josef Spillner schrieb:
> Am Montag, 16. April 2007 16:10 schrieb Sebastian Pösterl:
>> In addition, I have some questions to clarify that I understand the
>> concept correctly. On the server runs a Webservice and the client
>> connects to it. Is the client a desktop application (KNewStuff I guess)
>> or a webpage? Does the Webservice also handle up/downloading or does it
>> just present data? And what do I need to do to setup such a service?
> 
> There doesn't have to be a web service running - in fact most of the time we 
> use simple XML files, auto-generated or not. There can be a web service in 
> addition so that a back channel can be opened for users to contribute ratings 
> and comments, which could only awfully be handled through file uploads.
> 
I see, so there's not that big difference.

> [...]
> 
>> I dont' know if D-Bus makes sense in your case, because the goals GHNS
>> and NSM want to achieve are quite different. GHNS wants to provide a
>> platform that makes it easy to share documents (e.g. wallpapers,
>> pictures, PDFs). Therefore, it's aimed to make a end-user's life easier.
> 
> This observation is fully correct.
> 
>> On the other hand, NSM is aimed to be used by developers. The idea is
>> that many applications have plugins but only some have a mechanism to
>> update or download additional plugins easily. Therefore, I want to
>> provide a framework to make it easy for developers to equip their
>> application with a plugin update mechanism.
> 
> That's also the goal of GHNS. We already distribute extensions to e.g. the 
> Quanta+ web editor through GHNS. In KDE 4, we'll have the Kross framework for 
> embeddable scripts, and expect a lot more applications to distribute 
> extensions through GHNS.
> It's not just data files for the "end user".
> 
Thanks for pointing that out. I didn't know that before.

>> The NSM daemon runs on the 
>> user's computer. Whereas the developer has to upload a XML file that
>> contains a list of plugins to a server. In this context using D-Bus
>> makes perfectly sense, because the developer should be free to choice a
>> language. All in all, the end-user should not even recognize that NSM
>> even exists.
> 
> I see. So the design choice to use D-Bus has been made to accomodate the high 
> number of programming languages. We don't use D-Bus in KNewStuff2, but the 
> API only has two main entry points, namely a method for upload and one for 
> download. Wrapping those for other languages or D-Bus should be possible.
> 
Upload isn't featured in NSM and I don't plan to support it in the
daemon. Nevertheless, I started writing an application that helps
setting up the repository's XML file. An upload feature there would be a
benefit.

>> I think you're project is really cool and fits perfectly in the web 2.0
>> world, but I hope that I could make it clear that the only common
>> property is that both download stuff. Therefore, I don't think it would
>> be that easy to merge both projects or adjust one to another.
> 
> Upload, versioning etc. is not on your roadmap at all?
> 
> I could make our engine (which runs beneath the dialogs) persistent and write 
> a proof-of-concept D-Bus integration. Most of the engine's work relies on 
> cache files, thus turning it into a long-running daemon would be possible and 
> could probably help you understanding the similarities.
> 
The current XML format has already a version field. (For uploading see
my statement above.) As I mentioned in my previous mail your XML file
format is really great and I'm not reluctant to use your format in the
future.

> Josef
> 
> P.S. There is a point of irony in the web 2.0 statement from a computer 
> science perspective :-)
> Web services are RPC, while D-Bus is IPC, so both are the same thing just on 
> different distances.
> 
- From a user's perspective it's web 2.0, because you can share whatever
you like with everyone on the world. It's not a social * service, but
you can share things and that is an important feature of the web 2.0 in
my opinion.

- --
Greetings,
Sebastian Pölsterl
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