VIO - Visual IO Agents

[nf2]

Donald Straney wrote:
> I really like the idea of standardizing the desktop VFS between KDE
> and GNOME, but to me having it built into a GUI really doesn't seem
> like the right way to go.  Registering handlers by adding handler
> libraries into a certain directory (like /usr/lib/vio/) might be
> better.  The non-GUI-dependent parts (libvio and the messaging) sound
> great, though.
>
> Donald Straney

I think a GUI for handlers would definitely help the user. For instance 
i do a lot of PHP programming directly on the webserver. For editing i 
use JEdit (because it works transparently over FTP). For copying files i 
use Nautilus. The problem is that it's intransparent when my desktop is 
connected to the FTP server. So i get annoying connection errors, 
because the FTP-server only allowes a certain number of concurrent 
connections. If the protocol handler had a GUI i could monitor 
connections and disconnect with a mouseclick.

Another example would be handling archives with VIO. Let's say i want to 
add files to ftp://user@ftpserver.org/dir/subdir/archive.tar.gz#tar:.... 
For write operations on archives it might be better to cache the archive 
locally and send it back to the server when the user presses the "save" 
button in the archive agent (the systray icon of the archive agent might 
change its symbol for archives that have not been saved and/or complain 
with popping up messages).

I guess other protocols like smb: or bluetooth: have other "anomalies" 
which should be made visible and controllable with a GUI.

What i want to say is that different protocol handlers have very 
different user interface requirements. It will be hard to standardize 
them (to have a Gnome-UI-server and a KDE-ui-server which provide 
compatible interfaces). With decoupling agents from the desktops and 
allowing them to bring their own GUI we would also have more 
competition: For instance KDE users might use KFTPAgent and KSMBAgent, 
but prefer GBluetoothAgent, because it is just more mature and has the 
nicer GUI...

just some thoughts...

regards
norbert