XEmbed ipc semantics

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2003-08-22 at 09:43, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote:
> It would be very useful for XEmbed to support simple ipc messages to be
> sent between client and embedder.
> 
> - A line edit may want to send a line of text. 
> - A button may want to emit a signal / trigger an action in the embedder.
> - An application may want an embedded browser to fetch a URL.
> 
> Has there been any research or work done in this field, and if so, can 
> anyone point me in the right direction?

Well, the canonical example in this area is Bonobo, a complete CORBA
framework for interprocess widget and (to some extent) document 
embedding that uses XEMBED.

But that doesn't really count as "simple ipc messages"

Perhaps the way messages are sent in the startup notification spec
is a better example of how to send arbitrary messages over 
X Client messages. 

(This is actually, I believe a formal description of something found in
the KDE libraries; I forget the name of the KDE classes.)

However, I'm not really sure putting an escape hatch for arbitrary
messages into XEMBED makes a lot of sense... the client and
embedder are free to exchange whatever client messages they want.
Why make it part of XEMBED?

If we do eventually have a standard freedesktop.org IPC mechanism
(D-BUS, say), then it might make sense to define a standard way
that that integrates with XEMBED. (Though XEMBED supposes that client
and embedder have some other way of talking to each other *before*
XEMBED starts...)

Regards,
					Owen