UI independance

[Christopher Browne]

On 13 Feb 2003 20:24:04 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Matthew Vanecek <mevanecek at yahoo.com>  said:
> On Thu, 2003-02-13 at 16:40, Derek Atkins wrote:
> > Christopher Browne <gnucash at cbbrowne.com> writes:
> > 
> > > Why go with something that will continue to be flaky for years to come
> > > when there's an /already mature/ technology that is /already part of
> > > GNOME/?
> > 
> > Well, the counter argument is that the point was to try to separate
> > ourselves from Gnome -- in particular to enable a Qt/KDE UI.  Adding
> > yet more gnome deps doesn't quite help in that regards.
> > 
> > However, I still think a set of bonobo services would be a good
> > thing.  Any volunteers?
> 
> Not yet. :)
> 
> I'd like to point out, using CORBA doesn't necessarily tie you to GNOME,
> nor does it create a GNOME dependency.  If you have a well-designed (or
> at very least, standards-compliant) interface, than any other CORBA
> application can connect, be it bonobo apps, Visibroker apps, or whatever
> (what's the other free implementation?).

OmniORB, MICO, and TAO are the other "big names" in terms of "free software" 
ORB implementations...

> The dependency would be on the CORBA library we used, from the engine
> standpoint. The UI dependency would be on whatever CORBA library *it*
> used.  If they happened to be the same, so much the better.  And, can't
> IDL be compiled with any IDL compiler?  Can't we construct the CORBA
> interface such that it will work with whatever is currently installed? 
> Do I sound like I'm rambling....hmm, too much bier...

It's not /quite/ that simple.  In the case of ORBit, created for GNOME, there 
is a UDS-based transport that is used by default that is not (as far as I can 
tell) compatible with any other ORB.

I'm of two minds about this:
- On Zaphod's one head, interoperability is important, so this is "bad."
- On his other head, UDS doesn't leave network sockets open for outside 
attackers to, well, attack, and when users probably don't even /know/ that by 
running GNOME apps, they are potentially creating network vulnerabilities, 
it's "good" to keep from doing so.
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