GTT: Announce & Question

[Jonathan Blandford]

linas@linas.org (Linas Vepstas) writes:

> On Tue, Sep 04, 2001 at 04:41:20PM -0400, Jonathan Blandford was heard to remark:
> > linas@linas.org (Linas Vepstas) writes:
> > 
> > > So, the 'big question': what is the best way of tying/integrating this
> > > with gnucash? 
> > 
> > What kind of integration are we talking about?  
> 
> Well, I'm not sure.  That's why I asked ....
> 
> > The current way to
> > communicate between two applications in GNOME is to create an IDL
> > interface, and talk between them.  Or do you just mean save a file that
> > gnucash can use?
> 
> Stupid question, but maybe you know teh answer: the IDL compiler for
> gnome -- is it gnorba? Is it capable of creating more general language
> bindings (kind-of-like swig does)?

IDL is the Interface Description Language [1].  It defines an interface
between two objects.  The CORBA spec then describes how to communicate
across that interface.  For example, the old capplets in the gnome
control-center use an interface to describe how they're embedded, how
the buttons work, etc.  Bonobo also uses it to define the interfaces it
uses.

gnorba is the old GNOME object-activation mechanism (way of locating
objects and launching them).  It has been replaced by OAF (recently
renamed Bonobo Activation).  ORBit is used by GNOME to generate
C-bindings.

The whole point of CORBA is that you can have multiple
languages/interfaces talk to the same interface.  As an example, there
are perl and python bindings to CORBA that let you access an object.

> Here's what I really want these days:  an IDL compiler that can read my
> IDL, and auto-generate XML readers and writers.   

IDL isn't a file format here.  What you can do is define an interface
that describes the data, and pass it across directly

> (I recently wrote xml for gtt, and it is very very repetitive
> cut-n-paste, and should really have been auto-gened from an IDL)

Every time I write something that reads xml, I come to this conclusion.
I'm not sure what such a thing would look like.

Thanks,
-Jonathan

[1] In the spirit of overloaded acronyms everywhere in the computing
world, it's also the Interactive Data Language.  Not important here,
though. (-: