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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: network communication using DCOP
From:       Raphael Langerhorst <raphael-langerhorst () gmx ! at>
Date:       2004-03-20 12:59:56
Message-ID: 200403201359.56019.raphael-langerhorst () gmx ! at
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On Tuesday 16 March 2004 21:07, Raphael Langerhorst wrote:
> On Monday 15 March 2004 20:18, Christian Loose wrote:
> > You might want to take a look at kdenonbeta/saape instead which is a
> > SOAP<->DCOP bridge. Unfortunately there wasn't much development after the
> > initial check-in.
>
> I'll have a look at it,

hmmm, just had a look. There is not much documentation there... and I can't 
even compile because todays kdenonbeta fails to configure (didn't spend any 
time trying to fix it). Maybe saape is even useful, but another thought just 
came up:
what about adding network support do DCOP directly, I mean something like a 
"DCOP server <-> network (that is, own simple - and fast - protocol) <-> DCOP 
server" bridge.

Currently I'm thinking about two possibilities to implement that:

1) either enable dcop clients to give an additional parameter to send commands 
that would represent the remote server (either IP-adress or hostname), so the 
message gets transfered to the remote host first and the dcop server there 
handles the command.

2) make the dcopserver network aware (that is, listen on a specific port). 
Additionally allow clients to connect to a remote dcop server (an extra 
optional parameter to attach() or sth).


Both of these probably need some modifications in the ICE library. What I 
would propose here is to add an additional library with a similar interface 
to ICE. The dcopserver than uses ICE connections for local messages and the 
other library for remote communication.


If some explainations given here are "clumsy" and are not dcop-like then it's 
because I haven't read much of the source code of dcop yet but am just about 
to do that. So my descriptions should get better the more I know about the 
internals of dcop.


Maybe an additional word about standards like XML-RPC or SOAP... sure it's 
nice to have such bridges - and I don't think what I propose interferes with 
that. But they are held very "general" which would cause additional protocol 
overhead that could be avoided with a clean and simple network protocol 
between the dcop servers (for proposal 1) respectively between dcop client 
and remote dcop server (for proposal 2).


What do you think about that? And what option do you favor?

Raphael
 
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