[Pyobjc-dev] Inter-application communication adventures (was: GUI testing)

[Dinu G. <gh...@da...>]

Ronald Oussoren:

> If the application supports loading plugins you could load a dummy 
> plugin that is only used as a communication vehicle between the test 
> framework and the runloop in the application. Writing plugins that 
> load Python code is not too hard, I have done a proof of concept 
> implementation some time ago (check the mailinglist archives) and I 
> intend to add a supported version of that to the bridge.

That sounds too hackumbersome to me. So I've looked into the class
NSDistributedNotificationCenter which allows notifications across
applications, but only strings can be passed (which is not enough
in this case). And BTW this seems to be buggy in PyObjC; I'll sub-
mit a bug report, shortly.

Thereafter I've tried distributed objects using NSConnection, which
works for me when passing "simple stuff" like a dictionary to an-
other app, but it seems to be copied oneway and I can't seem to
manipulate the original object in the original app...

Distributed objects in ObjC use type modifiers like oneway, bycopy
and byref and it would be interesting to know how much of this (if
anything) already works in PyObjC, or if it ever has a chance of
working on this side of the bridge?

My gut feeling is that one could play dirty and exchange string
representations of Python objects via distributed notifications
in both directions as some kind of a work around, but I can't use
this either, as long as that mechanism also seems to be buggy.

Dinu

--
Dinu C. Gherman
......................................................................
"A whole generation has grown up with the idea that it is normal
for them to have no freedom." (Richard M. Stallman)