Hi Everybody, We recently had a discussion on IRC surrounding several problems:
1. How to handle different file formats in picogui apps 2. How to embed apps into other apps (similar to Bonobo/KParts/OLE) 3. How to manage application resources and configuration 4. How to do all this in a way that doesn't interfere with picogui's network transparency The current solution-in-progress to the problem of configuration is a small client-side library to store app configuration and load files that are packaged along with the app. This has the advantage of being simple and relatively standalone, but doesn't handle embedding/format loading, and doesn't handle language and network transparency. To give you an idea of the level of app embedding I'd like to see, here's a typical example situation: - The pgl-launcher applet embeds a copy of the file manager pointed at a directory full of programs, to display the menu of available apps - The user clicks an app, it's recognized as a picogui application rather than a normal directory, and it's executed. In this case let's assume it's an image viewer app - The user opens a file using the image viewer, it embeds the file manager to allow the user to pick the image. This does away with the crufty business of trying to manage a server-side file picker dialog. - When the user hilights an image, another copy of the image viewer can be embedded in the file manager to show a thumbnail This requires a lot of capability that can't be on the server-side since it needs the client's filesystem, but also doesn't belong in the client library. It could be implemented in res_* libraries, but duplicating this code for every language doesn't make much sense. My proposed solution is an application server. This server would run client-side on any machine that has picogui clients running. It would do the following: - When an app asks for a resource belonging to it, it would return a path in the client's filesystem where it can be located - Load and store configuration options for the app - Launch embedded applications indexed by mime type All of the IPC between the client and app server would be over normal app messages, so there wouldn't need to be any special extensions to the client library. All it would require would be an easy way to send an app message to the app server running on the same machine as the client, and wait for a response. -- Only you can prevent creeping featurism! ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Pgui-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/pgui-devel
