FAQ #6: not a component system?

[Havoc Pennington]

Jeroen T. Vermeulen wrote:
> I'm a bit puzzled by question number 6 in the FAQ: "Is D-BUS a component
> system?"
> 
>     http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-faq.html#components
> 
> The explanation there says "no," but it doesn't say why.  In fact, apart
> from that assertion, *everything* else in the entry says to me that yes,
> D-BUS is a component!
> 

You could think of D-Bus as a way to control components remotely, 
perhaps. Same as CORBA, SOAP, etc. This means D-Bus uses much of the 
same terminology (object, introspection, etc.) that you would find in a 
component system, but doesn't mean that D-Bus is the same thing as a 
component system.

If you look at how components are used, for example how XPCOM is used to 
implement fine-grained parts of Firefox, if you tried to use an IPC 
system for that it would be a train wreck.

You can also think about which combinations make sense; so if you take 
any object/component system (Java objects, XPCOM, etc.) it generally 
makes sense to bind it to any IPC system (D-Bus, CORBA, SOAP). But 
chaining IPC systems together (while people do it) is often pretty 
undesirable.

Havoc