Comments on: Central Services: Architecture Overview

By: doctormo

doctormo — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:41:06 +0000

It takes data sources from hardware devices and translates them into usable data for the local machine. Examples are ipods (libpod), blackberries (barry), palms and so on. The idea is not to replace detection or existing access libraries but bridge the functionality into a common api for each data set.

By: Rodney Dawes

Rodney Dawes — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:47:33 +0000

What does the “hardware” piece do exactly? That seems like something that is already taken care of by HAL/udev/DeviceKit/whateveritistoday no?

By: doctormo

doctormo — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:53:16 +0000

Aye, while they do harp on about Gnome in their docs, this project isn’t GUI based and is dBus based. It should be possible to use on any system without gnome or any gnome libs.

By: Vadim

Vadim — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 14:52:21 +0000

It’s not “bound by”, it’s “built on” technologies developed by gnome.

That said, unless you’re creating interfaces (which are obviously in gtk+ for vala), it’s fine to be used on kde. With some programming skills, you can most likely create a qt interface for a vala program too.

By: desnotes

desnotes — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:39:35 +0000

Maybe I am missing something but in the intro to Vala they say:

“Vala is a new programming language that aims to bring modern programming language features to GNOME developers without imposing any additional runtime requirements and without using a different ABI compared to applications and libraries written in C.”

Later:

“Many developers want to write GNOME applications and libraries in high-level programming languages but can’t or don’t want to use C# or Java for various reasons, so they are stuck with C without syntax support for the GObject type system.”

Is Vala binded to gtk & Gnome or are they just using Gnome development as an example of what Vala can do?

By: Vadim

Vadim — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:31:12 +0000

Of course not. Libraries can be installed anywhere, and anyway, in a typical “I’m smarter than the programmer next to me”, KDE authors will probably write their own scheme for this.

(see kwin, dcop, etc.)

By: doctormo

doctormo — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 13:21:25 +0000

Vala isn’t gnome based, nor is gobject. Are you thinking of something else?

By: desnotes

desnotes — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:18:33 +0000

I liked the concept of ‘Central Services’ before it received its new name. I believe it can be immensely useful. I just have one question regarding the use of Vala. Does the use of a Gnome tool to write the application exclude its use on KDE?

By: vadi

vadi — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:47:39 +0000

I dont see a use for such a service yet.

But vala is good…

By: doctormo

doctormo — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:33:10 +0000

You could if tracker was a field indexer and their dbus api provided type based objects instead of file pointers and such. The full text indexer is only one part of the system.