Re: Excellent technical overview of D-BUS

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 1 Sep 2004, at 08:20, Rogelio Serrano wrote:

> On 2004-09-01 14:54:02 +0800 Richard Frith-Macdonald 
> <richard@brainstorm.co.uk> wrote:
>
> [snip]
> > While the organizational simplicity of that is appealing, I'm not 
> > sure it's a good idea.
> > The gdomap server is just used to look up ports by service name ... 
> > it's needed in
> > order to locate a service on the network, but plays no role in the 
> > actual messaging.
>
> I see. What about starting services on demand? No more message bus. 
> Just a service monitoring and lookup hub. But still split into local 
> and network parts.

Ah ... I forgot that part.
Yes, I think that launching services on demand is a good thing - and I 
think a
daemon to do it is a good thing (if implemented in a very security 
conscious way).
I don't think gdomap is at all appropriate for it though ... I would 
rather have another
daemon for the job (or if it is *really* important to keep the daemon 
count down,
I'd extend gdnc or gpbs rather than gdomap).

> > Currently we have host-local DO via unix domain sockets 
> > (NSMessagePort)
> > except on windows, and this does not require/use gdomap ... since we 
> > don't
> > need to look up the  service on the network.  We know it's local and 
> > can
> > look it up via a local database of some sort (eg. the local 
> > filesystem).
> > > If you dont want network DO then dont run the network ipc part.
> > Yes.
>
> Now I need to start reading gdomap code.

If you are wanting to write a service/application launching daemon, I 
think you would
be better-off writing it in ObjC and designed to communicate with other 
processes using DO.
ie, write it entirely using the base library classes so it's completely 
portable.
For this I would recommend looking at gdnc (for basic DO server 
operation), and NSWorkspace.m
(application launching) and GSServicesManager.m for more complex stuff.