D-BUS: Somewhere OBVIOUS, explain _specifically_ why D-BUS vs CORBA, vs. DCE, vs. SOAP, etc.

[Zack Rusin]

On Thursday 20 January 2005 22:51, David A. Wheeler wrote:
> DCOP: DCOP is an RPC mechanism designed by KDE for its use.
> However, it depends on Qt, which causes some drawbacks for
> some desirable uses.

Your DCOP section is incorrect. There's nothing in DCOP that would make 
Qt mandatory. In fact there are two proof of concept implementations 
which don't depend on Qt at all:
- http://webcvs.kde.org/kdebindings/dcopc/ in C uses Glib/GTK+ 
- http://webcvs.kde.org/kdenonbeta/lyod/ uses STL C++.

Also ICE != Ice and you meant the second :) 

Your COM/DCOM is also a little inaccurate. COM does suffer a lot from 
its IDL, GUID's and reference counting but there are addons that 
address those issues. Security and reliability have been its bigger 
problems. Also COM+ partially addressed some of those issues. 

Comparing XML-RPC and SOAP to D-BUS is a little unfair but I guess you 
did that for completness. There really is nothing saying that we 
couldn't make it support bi-directional messages and broadcasts though. 
Especially since we could make it work with potentially any transport.

Otherwise I agree that it'd be nice to have some kind of a comparison 
between them all. Personally I think that maybe instead of a writeup we 
could have a table with a few ipc platforms and a few columns listing 
some of the more common features people are looking for when 
researching ipc's. This way maybe we could avoid articles where people 
say that D-BUS is revolutionary because it's message based like no 
other IPC... Oh, wait... Nevermind ;)

Zack

-- 
"In Murphy We Turst"