[Pipet Devel] MARC: msg 'the MICO/CORBA issue.'

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga wrote:
> 
> I found this on the KDE developer's forum. Looks like KDE is dropping
> pure corba based components too (gnome did this a while back, ORBit
> already supports shared libs as components).
> 
> http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=93734188322527&w=2
> 
> KDE 2x or 3 will have a KDE widget based component library (like
> bonobo?).

They stated the same thing a little more formally in a Linux Today article:

    http://linuxtoday.com/stories/10975.html

The comments posted by some readers are interesting as well.

>From what I gathered, KDE is concerned that CORBA is overkill (and too slow) for
user interface components and document embedding.  They say that CORBA is best
for distributing objects across a network but that nobody is really going to
want to run a GUI across a network.  So, KDE is planning on making a 'local
library' to handle these things without CORBA.

I _think_ Bonobo uses CORBA and is not quite what the KDE people had in mind. 
Preaching: It's pretty amazing how the Gnome and KDE developers seem to just
want to reinvent the wheel for the sake of getting to invent _something_.  They
have collaborated on a few minor issues lately, but the KDE 2x plan shows that
they are unwilling to touch (or help with) Gnome projects that may do just what
they want and help consolidate the desktop effort.

As for Loci, I think what KDE says about the shortcomings of CORBA for GUI
components is valid.  The approach we want to take is to get the GUI information
transferred quickly and _once_, via an XML description.  We wrote about this at
length in the past.  If the user needs a low-level component, Loci will point to
where it can be downloaded from, and the sysadmin will have to install it.  We
won't be taking the high-bandwidth X-Windows approach of running low-level
components interactively through the Internet.

Any other thoughts?


Cheers.
Jeff
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                         |        J.W. Bizzaro        |
                         |  jeff at bioinformatics.org   |
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                         | Open Source Bioinformatics |
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