Interviews of Damien Sandras

Get over it.

However, the other person who replied basically makes my point for me. I don't really care if it is truelly a single complex app or if it is serveral apps working in close cooperation as Damian describes in the gaim/dbus plugin (I just read it). The point is, that this integration needs to exist. It sounds like dbus is going to make this sort of thing much easier.

I wonder if gnomemeeting is explicitly hardcoded in that plugin or if dbus has a mechanism for discovery of available services where as a gaim plugin developer I could just ask gnome, via dbus something like

vidhandle = dbus_query( find , "sip video" );
dbus_send( vidhandle , sip_url );

or whatever and the sip handler (gnomemeeting or linphone or whatever) would just seamlessly pop up and handle the call. The communication could go both ways so that chat would still be via gaim (or gnomechat or whatever). Where the query would just figure out what apps were registered for that service and then return either the one the user has selected as the default or whatever is available.

The latter sort of use would be really cool in other areas like music on the desktop. Writing desktop apps that display what music you are playing would be really easy:

player_handle = dbus_query( find , active_player )
song = debus_query_object( player_handle , "current song" );

You could do the same thing to use generic playlist interfaces, bookmarks, history, contacts, etc all without having to hardcode these relationships between apps. That would be cool.

Are people thinking this broadly about dbus? Is what I'm proposing just absurdly broad and impossible to get working?

That level of desktop integration and communication would truelly blow other environments away.

The whole unix philosophy of small apps doing one thing well could be really applied strongly.

I could for example write the god of all contact managers, spend my whole life working on it, get 100s of other OSS developers enrolled and then every single app that has need for contact management ( every mail app, IM app, phone book, birthdays, etc manager ) would use it seamlessly on my uber integrated and dbussed to all hell desktop. And since dbus is becoming a cross platform standard, that would mean kde/gnome/etc whatever would all play together like a single seamlessly integrated app.

Zero duplication of effort both in terms of development and in terms of users having to know and understand various interfaces for the same kind of task or data. Bookmarks, history, playlists - gaim working with linphone and gnomemeeting - evolution using gcard using kontact - galeon, epiphany, firefox, nautilus all using the same bookmarks and history UI and backends (these components don't have to be gui apps) - all music apps bolting on the same sophisticated tag editing, cd burning, etc functionality by leveraging existing dbussed apps.

And the user gets to choose which pieces they want to use. I say use grip for ripping and any music player just asks for "ripper" and it happens magically.

Is this happening?

What you are proposing only makes sense if there is an adequate communication infrastructure in place so that these seperate apps can interact as powerfully and easily as these different components of evolution and other mail apps do now. Is dbus that mature? If so, kick ass. I agree 100%.

Otherwise, and this is true on every environment I know of, you are dreaming. Or, you aren't really someone who uses their email client in a very serious way. Contacts + calendaring + email + other crap all have strong relationships with each other. If they cannot interact then you are losing a lot of the power.