IDL language

[David Zeuthen]

On Fri, 2009-05-08 at 16:18 +0200, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> On Friday 08 May 2009 15:36:57 David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Hey,
> >
> > It has often come up that it would be nice to have an IDL language to
> > describe D-Bus interface. I've been working on this for a few days this
> > week. It's still early in development, but I thought I'd send a note
> > anyway.
> 
> In general I like the idea, but there is already the DBUS introspection format
> (http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-specification.html#introspection-format), 
> which basically does the same.
> It can be easily extended by a few things necessary for nice code generation, 
> as done e.g. by telepathy:
> http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/spec.html
> They add support e.g. for documentation, naming structs and members, enums, 
> etc.
> I would use that as a starting point.
> XML is a bit harder to read/write, but the (basic) format is already well 
> known.

Yeah, there's a couple dialects of D-Bus introspection XML and I'm
already aware of most of these (the Telepathy one and the one used by
ConsoleKit/DeviceKit-* [1] at least). I guess I should have mentioned
that.

Anyway, this effort is mostly about standardizing this stuff and move to
having an common official language that is easier to edit / grasp and
also share among projects (e.g. shared IDL repo). And also to have a
reference implementation of the IDL compiler. It should be trivial to
use the reference IDL compiler to generate the aforementioned D-Bus
introspection XMl variants (at least as an interim step).

Also, one obvious use of the reference IDL compiler would be to generate
nice docs for the D-Bus interfaces that we share via freedesktop.org.
Right now, it's XML and that's a bit frightening...

     David

[1] :
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/DeviceKit/DeviceKit-disks/tree/src/org.freedesktop.DeviceKit.Disks.Device.xml