[Portland] DAPI ideas

[Celso Pinto]

Hi Waldo,

Bastian, Waldo wrote:
> I was planning to do an IRC meeting later this week to discuss plans for
> moving ahead with DAPI. Your notes are a good start for that discussion.

is it a closed meeting? I'd be interested to attend, even if only as an
observer, if timezone differences allow.

> 
> As far as your broker idea goes, DBUS already provides automatic service
> activation, configuration of services may still require some more
> thought though. Currently DBUS has the following features that relate to
> your broker idea:
> 

(snipped)

I understand your concerns so I'd like to explain myself better: the
idea is that multiple applications (each with it's own activation
interface) can provide a distinct service, like the mentioned
DesktopBookmarkService.

Maybe the bookmarks service wasn't the best example, but with an
AddressBook service things get more clear I think. There are quite a few
applications on the desktop that provide each own address books like
Thunderbird, KContacts, Evolution, etc. Each one of these registered
itself as a provider of the AddressBook service but only one is the
default.

When a mail client application receives a vCard and the user chooses to
add that contact to the address book, then the only thing the mail
client application needs to do is to ask the broker to forward the
contact details to the address book service.

This way, only the broker has to know which application should be
activated when a message comes through the bus and it knows this by
asking the registry.

Also, the broker is a background process that should always be running
so client application developers do not need to go through the steps of
checking if a given DBUS service is running and if not, asking DBUS to
activate it. Just ask the broker to execute something, whether or not an
application will be started is not a concern.

I hope I managed to explain myself better, if not please let me know.

Thanks a lot for your comments, I'm looking forward to getting more of them.

Cheers,
Celso