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List:       kde-multimedia
Subject:    Intro & a couple of MCOP/Arts questions
From:       "David Harvey (Hamish)" <David.Harvey () bristol ! ac ! uk>
Date:       2000-05-25 12:39:36
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Hello all,

I've just joined the list. I had a brief look at MCOP a few months ago
but it was still in a quite a rough state. Looking again now I've got
KDE2 up and running on my home machine (Solaris compiles for work
continute to give me problems) it seems much more solid.

My interest in it is this. I am doing a PhD looking at software
architecture for flood forecasting systems. The architecture that I have
developed so far (with limited implementation in VisualWorks smalltalk)
is very similar to the arts architecture. Many of the ideas I had about
graphical programming for hydrological modelling are similar, I think,
to the artsbuilder idea (which, I gather, is not yet ported to the MCOP
based arts framework). Since I came across the same problems with CORBA
as you did in the development of arts, and since MCOP fits the bill much
better (most of the system involves independent modelling objects with
inflows and outflows of data) I thought I would investigate the
possibilitiy of using MCOP in a field for which it was not specifically
designed.

Having read back through the recent postings to the list, and round some
of the arts-project web site, I have some (quick to answer, I hope)
questions, and a couple of comments.

1) In the Linuxmusic interview, Stefan mentioned a chapter in the KDE2
devel book. It hasn't been released yet. Any ideas when it might be? It
would be interesting for more than MCOP stuff.

2) There has been a discussion of the role of SynthModule. This caught
my eye because I have encountered it in my first attempts to knock
together some working MCOP objects with streams. I gather that for
working streams, an object must inherit form SynthModule. I also gather
that SynthModule is empty - the guts are in StdSynthModule. How tied to
audio work are these classes (is it just the name which is
audio-related)? Would you imagine that, if I wanted objects connected by
async streams which fire packets of data around at intervals (5-15mins
in real time flood forecasting) that I would make use of StdSynthModule?

3) I would advise making every attempt to keep MCOP, with complete
streaming support, cleanly separate from Arts. That way it can be used
in varied environments, for a multitude of uses. It looks to me like a
well designed system, and I can imagine it becoming popular anywhere
that plugin-based or distributed streaming software is required - which
covers a lot of engineering modelling, simulation and forecasting. This
might also encourage the use of separate mcop and arts namespaces.

4) Connected with 2 and 3. Just a quick yes/no answer will suffice, so I
know if it is worth my hunting through the code. Can I build some
objects which communicate over streams using just the code in the mcop
directory (and mcopidl, of course) of the arts tree. Or do I need to
pull in stuff from arts/flow.

5, and finally) If anyone has some small working examples of MCOP
objects built from scratch (ie without making heavy use of arts code)
which talk by streams (the examples directory contains a straight
message passing example), it would be invaluable. Any stream types would
be interesting, but particularly async push streams.

My C++ coding is still limited, but since I would be using certain
quite new parts of MCOP, including support for special stream data
packet types, I might be able to contribute to the development of those
areas - probably little until I get going, admittedly.

Thanks for any time you can spend in answering these queries (even to
tell me that I have clearly misunderstood everything).

Cheers,
Hamish



--
+----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+
| David Harvey (Hamish)            | Email: David.Harvey@bristol.ac.uk |
| PhD Student                      |   Tel: +44 (117) 928 9768         |
| Water Management Research Centre |   Fax: +44 (117) 928 9770         |
| Department of Civil Engineering  |                                   |
| University of Bristol            |  http://eis.bris.ac.uk/~cedph     |
+----------------------------------+-----------------------------------+

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