[Pipet Devel] An apology, Loci, gnome, and CORBA

[Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga]

> > Now, just so you grok where I'm coming from, I don't much like gnome, it seems
> > big and slow and bloated, even compared to KDE. I've mainly heard bad things
> > about CORBA too, even from the gnome developers, who scrapped MICO in favor of
> > ORBit because it was too big and slow.
> 
> That has to be the most common knee-jerk criticism that I hear about software
> people just don't like for some reason.  When was the last time someone said
> they like such-and-such because it is small and fast, and just how much is
> such-and-such really capable of doing?

Well, I really like the flwm window manager because it is small and light. It 
even manages windows. It's my window manager of choice at home and for my VNC 
sessions. I like rxvt too, so there.

> > "CORBA is used in GNOME to export the internal engine of an application to the
> > rest of the system. Any CORBA client (GNOME compliant applications, regular
> > Unix applications, remote clients running on a different operating system) can
> > use the services that these application provides."
> > 
> > Sounds like loci right?
> 
> A simpler approach would be to just say, "Hey this is Python so live with it." 
> And we could just wrap some command-lines in Python and tada!  But how
> successful can Loci really be if we ignore the masses of Perl, Java and C++
> developers?  So, let's look into CORBA.

Well, that's exactly my point. If we were going to just write a simple shell 
over command line apps, we could just use python. If we want to do all the 
other neat things we either have to:

1) write our own 100% python custom loci RPC, registry, xml, ... tools

2) write python bindings to standard, in use, well maintained tools

3) scrap python and write C/C++/java apps

I think #2 is our best bet, heck you wouldn't catch me dead writing 
bioinformatics apps in a low level language, and #2 is simpler than #1, don't 
you think?
-- 
Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga
Bioinformatics Specialist
Institute of Neurobiology
hortiz at neurobio.upr.clu.edu