Roadmap?

[Havoc Pennington]

On Mon, 2003-10-13 at 06:23, David Zeuthen wrote:
> Speaking of the final API, are there any definitive documents on this? I
> can't find any.. If there are such a master document please point me to
> it.

All the docs are at http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/dbus ; I would
read in the order tutorial, spec, doxygen manual, though the first two
are not complete.

>  a.  type checking in method invocations, error handling (maybe just 
>      as simple as XMLRPC with error and error.text)

Type checking happens when you call dbus_message_get_args(). Or you can
use dbus_message_has_signature().  There are error replies, yes.

>  b.  IDL-compiler for generating stub/skeletons for mapping of values
>      from/to language and/or support library specific data types.

This is binding-specific whether the binding involves IDL, parsing of
the actual source code to be exported remotely, dynamic introspection,
or whatever. Using the plain C API, no.

>  c.  asynchronous method calls using ''futures'' as the return value
>      (''Active Object Pattern'' as used in ACE[2]).

You can make async calls either by keeping a DBusPendingCall or by
blocking in a separate thread.

>  d.  BLOB datatype; like XMLRPC got base64

Array of byte is a blob, presumably.

> If this is indeed planned, when can we expect to see this on HEAD? ;-)

Most of what will be there is, the macro-level thing missing is the GLib
server/skels generator.

> Oh, and the method/interface stuff, is that going to be useful in apps
> not using glib or Qt, e.g. plain C apps?

Well, plain C apps have to use it; whether it's useful, I don't know.
;-)

Havoc