[sugar] Updates This Week to the Sugar Almanac - Using the Datastore and More

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 5:17 PM, Faisal Anwar <fanwar at mediamods.com> wrote:
> Hi Tomeu,
>
> Thanks so much for the clarifications. I understand now the abstraction
> intended for metadata accessed through DSMetadata and DSObject and will try
> to write that up a little more forcefully. I guess the main thing I was
> concerned about was having a consistent and lasting interface to the
> datastore (which can certainly be implemented in the form of a dictionary if
> that is most appropriate). I hope this abstraction will hold moving forward
> so that activity developers are confident that their hooks in to datastore
> will work with the same behavior over time (this is part of the purpose of
> the documentation I'm working on).

Yes, I'm confident that we'll be able to maintain compatibility with
activities that use the current API, although I also hope that we'll
come up with something much better soon.

> With regards to the lower level DBus calls in datastore and elsewhere, what
> I'm really looking out for is what levels of the tech stack an activity
> developer will need to learn to build a fairly robust and complex activity.
> Of course, for some things lower level Dbus calls may be unavoidable, but
> I'm assuming that there should be a substantive interface in python that
> abstracts away the Dbus functionality for most developers. As I go through
> more of the code in datastore, presence, and elsewhere, I'll try to identify
> cases where perhaps a low-level Dbus call could be abstracted to some
> standard python calls.

Well, the low level API isn't really that hard to use. The dbus-python
bindings already do a great work of making easier to use DBus services
from python. If you find any capability in the low level bindings that
could be useful to activities and is not yet in the python wrapper,
please tell.

Thanks,

Tomeu