Common Desktop Interface Specification (aka CDIS), initial work

[Brad Hards]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 05:07 am, Ikke wrote:
> What I'd like to do now is to create some sample musicplayer (which
> doesnt play any music, actually, just gives some text output on whats
> going on) implementing this interface. This should be done by using DBUS
> (of course), and most preferably auto-generated code. I was thinking to
> use GObjects for this task, by creating GOB files from the interface
> specification (once more using XSLT). Of course the XML can (and should)
> be translated to KObjects, plain C code and whatsoever too.
I think you need to go back and update your original DAL proposal, to create a 
coherent vision (problem statement, architecture, technologies, etc). I don't 
have enough cross-desktop experience to tell whether the auto-translation is 
going to work in general, but it is certainly a fine goal.

> Question now is: does this format look reasonable? If it doesn't now is
> the time to change it.
As part of your specification design, you should probably review the methods 
that are exported from various applications that already exist. In 
particular, what you are designing is obviously pretty close to the way KDE 
apps provide dcop interfaces. So it might be worth looking at what Juk (for 
example) provides, and the types it returns.

> I'll also write some document describing how CDIS methods should be
> called (Get/Set,...) so "real" interfaces (which should be created later
> on, of course) fit together.
It might also be worth trying to figure out how you support optional features 
- which might be what a previous poster referred to as "profiles". For 
example, if the music player support the concept of a collection or playlist, 
do you want to be able to get the name of the current collection or playlist, 
or to change it. Now, if that is a required feature, then music players that 
don't provide it can't implement the spec (even though they might be able to 
do the main job - play a music track). If that isn't available, you are 
loosing functionality in your interface, and people will bypass it and go 
back to the per-application interface design, without CDIS.

Brad
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