Using corba IDL to describe DBus services ?

[Nicolas "Ikke" Trangez]

> Therefore we need a way to describe these data structure and generate
> some C/C++ headers, java files, and DBus stubs out of these
> definitions. 
> Wouldn't it be good to use a corba IDL syntax to describe the APIs,
> with some modified stubs generator which produce the DBus bindings ?
> Isn't it a problem encountered during the migration of GNOME or KDE to
> DBus ? How are the dbus APIs from these desktop applications
> defined ? 
Lots of DBus interfaces are barely documented.
I've been into this last year ("CDIS"), as I think being able to define
objects/interfaces in a machine-readable way, eg to create proxies in
different languages, is pretty important. It would allow us to have test
tools which check whether a DBus object really *does* implement a
well-defined interface, etc. The lack of interface definition format is
one of the reasons currenct interfaces aren't documented.

Anyway, I agree IDL (or a subset of it) might be a wise choice. Another
name might be approriate, we better don't make people think DBus is
CORBA ;-)

Nicolas