[Portland] The Code

[Lubos Lunak]

On Thursday 16 February 2006 00:24, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> On Wednesday 15 February 2006 22:23, Lubos Lunak wrote:
> I have been working on a similar solution[1] for some time now.
> It started out as a library to let Qt applications do such things like
> starting preferred applications in a crossplatform way.

 Yes, it seems quite similar. Note that in my case the plan is also to have 
"native" Qt API for the calls integrated directly in Qt instead of the ugly 
plain C, so that Qt developers wouldn't even have to know/care what's 
underneath.

 I actually already have some minimal experience here, I think I've already 
mentioned http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/download/qtkde/ here (run Qt Designer in 
KDE on SUSE 9.3/10.0 and try e.g. the color dialog). It's Qt<->KDE and the 
transport mechanism is DCOP, but the principle is about the same.

> However I started moving over to an out-of-process modell using DBus, thus
> enabling service implementation in the desktop's preferred way (like you do
> as well) and make it accessible to non-Qt applications (the service API is
> now a DBus interface)
>
> My suggestion would be to do a simple prototype interface in DBus, try to
> implement it for the common DEs, find current restrictions/implementation
> problems, get feedback from application developers, repeat.

 Agreed. More or less, with some details. My implementation is actually not a 
prototype. It can serve as one but it doesn't have to be just that. Some more 
work and it should be perfectly usable the way it is.

 I'm also not sure about DBus, I don't quite see what it should buy us besides 
the hype (which I admit may be caused by me not knowing much about it). I 
intentionally don't care much about the underlying mechanism and autogenerate 
code related to this to be able to switch later if needed, but IMHO a simple 
unix domain socket will do just fine for now. Running on different hosts will 
cause a bunch of its own problems so we'd better ignore that for now, there's 
no need to have any authentication or similar, and simple socket has some 
advantages like not having any dependencies (how many apps actually do use 
DBus now?) or being well tested *cough* technology :). Not that I really care 
though.

> I am volunteering to work on the KDE service implementation

 Good ... now that's at least two of us :).

> and keeping the 
> Qt3 DBus binding in shape for the necessary requirements as we move along.

-- 
Lubos Lunak
KDE developer
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