From kde-core-devel  Mon Mar 26 13:02:31 2001
From: Simon Hausmann <sh () caldera ! de>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 13:02:31 +0000
To: kde-core-devel
Subject: Re: Future of DCOP
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-core-devel&m=98561206418397

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 01:50:41PM +0200, Matthias Ettrich wrote:
> 
> I've done some thinking about DCOP recently, under the lights of the ongoing 
> problems with libICE on platforms other than Linux and the fact that it's 
> unmaintained.
> 
> Thinking about alternatives, there are really just two options, ORBit and 
> MCOP. 
> 
> Given that MCOP is meant for multimedia and that we eventually will have to 
> or want to utilize ORBit anyway in the future for all kinds of desktop 
> cooperation (accessability, session management (XSMP over ORBit rather than 
> ICE), network directory services, ...), I'd like to evaluate porting DCOP 
> over to ORBit as underlying communication layer. 
> 
> DCOP is a nifty ipc solution based on standard X11 and libICE is definitely 
> fixable.  But I really care more about semantics and ease of use than the 
> binary format on the network. Replacing libICE with ORBit should be straight 
> forward - almost. The only technical problem I see right now is for the 
> DCOPServer to safely detect when a client goes down. I hope this is solvable, 
> if not by adding something to ORBit. I haven't checked this yet.

A simple mind-game (germany saying, doesn't translate very well into english) :
Would for our stuff (DCOP, XSMP) a simplistic GIOP implementation based on Qt
container types and QSocket and friends be sufficient?

(assuming we don't need the latest CORBA::DynAny, ORBit-IDL, etc. features for 
our stuff)

Of course we don't have such a thing at this point and ORBit is here and now and
probably a seriously feasible solution. But _if_ GIOP would be sufficient....I
would kind of like the idea... would be very interesting to hack something like 
that.. :)

Bye,
 Simon