DAL proposal, resume

[Ikke]

Ok, this is how I see things after I got some feedback here and on
desktop-devel @ gnome.

As J5 noted, writing a separate daemon that takes input from different
sources and generates unified output is nonsense. Indeed, it are the
applications that should send out "good" events, or (like in the
xscreensaver case) some helper daemon (that can in turn listen to
different non-conforming apps, of course).

This implies there will have to be:
a) a standard describing different interfaces the DBusMessages should
comply to
b) code a library/libraries to easy the use of this system for app
developers so they don't have to care about the underlying DBUS system,
but can just do something like "DAL_gotNewEmail()", where DAL (still
working title ;)) will generate a well-formed dbusmessage and send it on
the wire.
This lib can also force the app to deliver "good", "conformant" data.
It can also be used by listening applications by using callbacks.
Propably there should be some versions of this: a low level one that can
be used by all high-level ones, and a high-level gtk/glib library, a
kde/qt library, python bindings,...

The biggest work will be to write the interfaces I guess :-)

Jamie McCracken made the comparison[1] with Bluetooth profiles too on
desktop-devel at gnome, which can be useful.


Is it possible to get some Wiki page on fdo or so to make it easy to
write down new thoughts, remove deprecated stuff,...?

Thanks and regards,

Ikke						http://www.eikke.com

[1]
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2005-January/msg00122.html and following.