[Pipet Devel] front(uil) to middle(dl) communication

[Brad Chapman]

Hey Deanne and Jeff;
    Since you guys are planning on doing both fronts in python, what I 
was thinking about doing was taking the front to middle XML protocol 
and extracting it into python function calls, so that a lot of the 
XML generating code could be reusable in both of your front ends. For 
instance, instead of having to generate XML like this to connect two 
nodes:

	<front>
	  <connect>
		   <workspace id = 'id for the workspace containing the loci to 
connect.'/>
	    <input id = 'workspace1/workspace2/container1.xml'
			   connector_id = '1'/>
	    <output id = 'workspace1/workspace2/viewer2.xml'
			    connector_id = '1'/>
	  </connect>
	</front>

Instead, I could just add a function call like:

connect_loci(self, workspace_id, input_id, in_connector_id, 
output_id, out_connector_id), 

and you could just call this instead, and all of the xml building 
could happen inside of this.
    I think this would make more efficient re-use of code, and could 
help pave the way towards a corbafied front to middle communication 
protocol. 
    What do you guys think about this? If you like it, I can put it 
together on my local copy and make a new tarball of it, so you can 
work off of this (since we don't have cvs ready for the new directory 
structure yet). 

Brad