On Sat, 17 Sep 2011 15:24:39 -0400 Michael Mol <mike...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > BTW, there *was* an standard that did everything dbus does: ORB, the > > Object Request Broker. They tried to use that as IPC years ago, but > > is so damn complicated to implement right they decided to better > > implement a new standard. The standard is dbus. > > Interesting. I'd heard of ORB, even tried to play with it a bit, but > the documentation I've found is terrible. Like a number of fields I've > poked at, if you wan to understand how to do something, you have to do > it, making for a tricky. You did well to walk away from ORB and it's implementation layer CORBA. It was one of those things not designed by real engineers but by bloated committees. It tried to be all things to all systems and ended up being useable by none, much like XML and Java. There was a standards body tracking ORB, I forget which one, but none of that matters as the folks who should use it - system builders - saw it's flaws quite quickly. Even Gnome has dropped it and are now moving over to dbus. Dbus is an interesting piece of technology and rather useful, it does it a disservice to knock it. As Canek posted a few mails higher up, it implements a standard messaging layer on top of existing mechanisms. You know about the existing mechanisms so you also know that they only provide a means for communication, not the language used for the communication. And developing a language for every IPC you want to do becomes tiresome very quickly. As an analogy (albeit a poor one) dbus relates to IPC as TCP relates to IP - all the boring plumbing underneath your communication that makes it work at all is already there. It would work best if dbus doesn't become yet another way to do IPC, but replaces many of them. Imagine how much unbloat you could accomplish if you could remove all the little bits of IPC plumbing scattered throughout the average Unix system's codebase. There are many code projects out there that deserves to be maligned to the point of painful death, then killed. But I honestly beleive dbus is not one of them. -- Alan McKinnnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
