How to discover introspection toplevel objects

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 12:25:36AM +0100, Tako Schotanus wrote:
> John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> 
> >On Tue, 2006-01-24 at 23:40 +0100, Tako Schotanus wrote:
> > 
> >
> >>I think you should too ;-)
> >>
> >>Not sure if it is actually like that now, it has been a while since I 
> >>tried but back then none of the freedesktop objects themselves 
> >>implemented introspection.
> >>
> >>What I wondered is: can we expect that for 1.0 all freedesktop objects 
> >>implement introspection. And in the way that you can get at all the 
> >>child objects too?
> >
> >No, you can not expect it.  This is because there is no way to
> >autogenerate introspection when using low level dbus calls.
> 
> I understand, I wasn't talking about auto-generating, what I meant was: 
> can we expect our beloved dbus-develoeprs to at least implement 
> introspection for all their objects thereby leading by example? :-D
> 
> That way anyone _not_ implementing will hopefully starting feeling bad 
> enough to do so afterall, or am I being naive?

The GLib, Python, Java and Perl language bindings all support the 
Introspection interface, generating the introspect XML data automatically,
with little-to-no extra effort required on the part of the developer
writing the service (amount of effort varies depending on level of support
the language provides for reflection). 

So unless the app developer goes out of their way not to let the language
bindings do their thing, then their app will fully support introspection
pretty much by default.

Furthermore, its been my experiance that when writing a DBus service,
one typically writes a client to go along with it, at very least to 
serve as a test suite. In writing this client code, one quickly realizes
that it is well worth while ensuring that introspection is working.
So I think we'll find that all non-trivial applications will end up
supporting introspection, even though its not technically compulsory.

Regards,
Dan.
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