[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday 31 December 2005 10:51, Dan Kegel wrote:
> My impression is that he wants to replace all of the
> current set of X / gnome / qt APIs with a new one based
> on web services.

i'm not involved with RUDI myself, but i have listened to what has been said 
by those who are and the goal and path seems pretty clear:

to create a set of APIs that can be called via an IPC mechanism[1], so as to 
avoid problems associated with direct library linkage. calls to this API are 
then fed to a platform-specific backend that provides the actual service; 
this part is transparent to the call app whose "even horizon" is the RUDI 
API.

example: an application wishes to store a username and password associated 
with a URL securely via the desktop's wallet/keyring service if it exists. so 
it makes the request via the RUDI API. this results in a call to the wallet 
system available on the desktop the app is running on (without the app having 
to care about that detail) and ensures it is stored (or not, in that case 
probably returning an error). repeat for retrieval.

this allows the idea of a "desktop wallet" to be used by 3rd party 
applications without having to figure out that on KDE you'd use the kwallet 
facilities, while on GNOME you'd use gnome-keyring (IIRC?) or if on 
$SOMETHING_ELSE you may have to provide for yourself or just not offer this 
feature to the user as they don't have a wallet.

replace the idea of a desktop wallet with file dialogs, print dialogs, 
mimetype activation requests and other "common and obvious desktop services" 
to flesh out the concept in full.

note that this doesn't replace X/Qt/Gtk+/whatever APIs, but rather wraps them 
in a common IPC layer for those who can't, don't want to or simply won't 
write directly to those APIs but who also wish for their app to integrate 
nicely with the desktop environment.


[1] while it seems Martin is thinking of using WSDL for service description, 
IPC would be provided by DBUS (for fairly obvious reasons). so calling it a 
"web service" is more than a stretch. probably more accurate is saying that 
it is a kind abuse of WSDL ;)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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