application integration standard proposal

[Gary Kramlich]

Richard Laager wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-09-04 at 21:40 +0200, Olivier Sessink wrote:
>> An example: "The end user is using a IM client, where the he's notified 
>> in the chat window that a new email arrived from the same person he's 
>> chatting to (even if the IM account is different from the email 
>> account). The user may right click this buddy in the IM client, and in 
>> the context menu it says you have unread mail from this person, and the 
>> context menu will allow you to email this user (open a compose window)"
> 
> I haven't read the draft standard, but I don't think there's anything
> wrong with this. You might want to talk to Gary about Guifications 3 and
> how that might be usable as a notification framework for all of this.
> Evolution already provides an address book, so the only other thing that
> would be required is potentially improvements on the Evolution <->
> Pidgin integration.
> 
> Richard

This is more about application integration, whereas guifications3 is 
about notification, although gf3 could be used as integration as well 
(would require some more designing, but could be possible).

I've only briefly read the spec, but it seems like most of this is 
already covered by Soylent.  Although the only active reference I can 
find to it is in Travis's blog http://treitter.livejournal.com/.

When it comes to application integration I have a few suggestions.  This 
is the part you want to be the simplest.  For example, 
purple-guifications, which is a feed plugin for guifications3 is only 
128 lines.  It doesn't do much more than register the feed, but still 
that's very acceptable for integration, especially since a good chunk of 
that is purple plugin overhead.

Also, when using IPC, try to keep it in a library.  If you're going to 
do dbus, use the C bindings.  If you don't want to go down that path, 
abstract communication out.  But as a fair warning, abstracting IPC out 
is not an easy task.

That's about all I have for now, if I think of anything else I'll let 
you know.

-- 
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>