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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: RPC Mechanisms (was: Re: [PATCH] bug in latest cvs
From:       Guillaume Laurent <glaurent () telegraph-road ! org>
Date:       2004-09-25 18:09:27
Message-ID: 200409252009.27039.glaurent () telegraph-road ! org
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On Saturday 25 September 2004 19:31, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
>
>  if it was possible to transmit a struct:
>
>  struct MountPointInfo
>  {
>     QString useful_name:
>  	QString mount_point;
> 	QString device;
> 	QString is_mounted;
>  }
>
>  then a) there wouldn't be a problem

Famous last words.

>  a _proper_ RPC runtime environment such as DCE/RPC does all this for
>  you [...]
>
>  and that's one of the reasons why freedce is 250,000 lines of code.

Allow me to chip in with my DCOP user (as in "developper of an app which uses 
DCOP") point of view. The argument I always oppose to people criticizing DCOP 
is that it took me about 20mn to add a DCOP interface to the application I 
was working on, starting with practically zero knowledge about it except 
that, well, it exists. Google, find a quick tutorial which says "make a .h 
with K_DCOP in it, add these lines to your app", do that, make, and voila.

DCOP is certainly limited, but its most important feature is that it is 
*SIMPLE*, so simple that using it is considered to be routine work, just like 
adding a widget to a dialog. That's where CORBA utterly failed and why it had 
to be replaced. And though I recall DCE/RPC to be much simpler than CORBA, I 
don't think it's as simple as DCOP. So until it's packaged into something at 
least as easy as DCOP, it will be irrelevant.

Your point about lack of type safety is valid, to the extent that such errors 
would cost significant development time. And general practice seems to show 
that they don't, while using a more complicated RPC mechanism does, so it's a 
very good tradeoff. Think of it as type-strict C++ vs. type-lax Ruby. Which 
one do you think you'll be writing code faster with ? In this area, ease of 
use generally wins over safety features.

-- 
						Guillaume.
						http://www.telegraph-road.org
 
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