[Sugar-devel] python hulahop article

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 18:55, Luke Kenneth Casson
Leighton<lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> On 7/27/09, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 17:28, Luke Kenneth Casson
>>  Leighton<lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
>>  > On 7/27/09, Brendan Eich <brendan at mozilla.com> wrote:
>>  >> XPCOM is self-deprecating. It's excessively costly for both callers and
>>  >> implementors of its interfaces, both in runtime overhead and in
>>  >> expressiveness restrictions.
>>  >
>>  >  i'd say that that's a price paid for the incredible power and
>>  > flexibility of what it brings, but hey, nobody said it would be easy
>>  > :)   i'm dead impressed that you got XPCOM right, and that it works as
>>  > expected, by providing seamless inter-language communication - and now
>>  > am a bit puzzled that it's to be deprecated.
>>
>>
>> Isn't that the same that GObject Introspection brings? You code in
>>  whatever language that produces a .so with some metadata, then you can
>>  call it from any language with bindings for g-o-i.
>
>  ah _ha_ - an assumption is ".so" :)  xpcom and DCOM you don't need
> the .so, you just "register" the code with the infrastructure, and it
> gets called (on demand, by a caller).  in c and c++ cases, that's a
> .so, but in the dynamic-language cases, it's definitely not the case.
>
>  but to be honest i need to look up gobject introspection before
> answering, and i'm glad that you've brought it to my attention - i'm
> supposed to know about these things :)

Yeah, you have a point there, though at least the python bindings
should allow you to provide python code to be called from the C side.
I'm just unsure if that's enough to provide something like mozilla has
today.

Though the gtk architecture is not too much service oriented, I think
it has some cases where the toolkit can be expanded by implementing
interfaces. Would be interested to see to which extend it matches the
XPCOM functionality.

Also would be interesting to see if the new gtk mozembed widget and
gtkwebkit provide DOM APIs similar to what xulrunner provides through
XPCOM.

To be clear, I don't think GObject has a component system that gets
close to XPCOM, but may be enough for your needs.

Regards,

Tomeu

>  l.
>