[openvrml-develop] Status update: openvrml-xembed D-Bustification

[Braden M. <br...@en...>]

I'm making some steady progress on the conversion of openvrml-xembed to
use D-Bus. For those with some knowledge of D-Bus, this will work by
making a VrmlControlFactory available as a system service. Applications
can use this service to create a new XEmbed control. At this point I
have a control and control host that can talk to one another with D-Bus;
and I'm in the process of rewiring the existing pipe-oriented logic to
use remote method calls via D-Bus. 

There are some significant advantages to this:

      * It's a lot easier to extend D-Bus interfaces than to extend the
        pipe-based custom IPC that I'd implemented. I think this will
        help significantly with making the control scriptable.
      * The resulting code (i.e., post-D-Bustification) is partitioned a
        bit better; and it should be a lot easier to tease out the
        platform-independent parts for repurposing in Mac and Windows
        variants of the control.

I'm on the fence about whether to push this stuff into a 0.17.x release.
0.18 is still some ways off and it would be nice to make this available
sooner. It shouldn't impact the libopenvrml API; so there's no problem
there. However, it will incur dependencies on D-Bus stuff as well as a
particularly fresh GTK+. I'm a little reluctant to do that in what is in
name a patch-level release.

-- 
Braden McDaniel                           e-mail: <br...@en...>
<http://endoframe.com>                    Jabber: <br...@ja...>