| 1 |
On Sat, 17 Sep 2011 15:24:39 -0400 |
| 2 |
Michael Mol <mikemol@×××××.com> wrote: |
| 3 |
|
| 4 |
> > BTW, there *was* an standard that did everything dbus does: ORB, the |
| 5 |
> > Object Request Broker. They tried to use that as IPC years ago, but |
| 6 |
> > is so damn complicated to implement right they decided to better |
| 7 |
> > implement a new standard. The standard is dbus. |
| 8 |
> |
| 9 |
> Interesting. I'd heard of ORB, even tried to play with it a bit, but |
| 10 |
> the documentation I've found is terrible. Like a number of fields I've |
| 11 |
> poked at, if you wan to understand how to do something, you have to do |
| 12 |
> it, making for a tricky. |
| 13 |
|
| 14 |
You did well to walk away from ORB and it's implementation layer CORBA. |
| 15 |
|
| 16 |
It was one of those things not designed by real engineers but by |
| 17 |
bloated committees. It tried to be all things to all systems and ended |
| 18 |
up being useable by none, much like XML and Java. |
| 19 |
|
| 20 |
There was a standards body tracking ORB, I forget which one, but none |
| 21 |
of that matters as the folks who should use it - system builders - saw |
| 22 |
it's flaws quite quickly. Even Gnome has dropped it and are now moving |
| 23 |
over to dbus. |
| 24 |
|
| 25 |
Dbus is an interesting piece of technology and rather useful, it does |
| 26 |
it a disservice to knock it. As Canek posted a few mails higher up, it |
| 27 |
implements a standard messaging layer on top of existing mechanisms. |
| 28 |
You know about the existing mechanisms so you also know that they only |
| 29 |
provide a means for communication, not the language used for the |
| 30 |
communication. And developing a language for every IPC you want to do |
| 31 |
becomes tiresome very quickly. |
| 32 |
|
| 33 |
As an analogy (albeit a poor one) dbus relates to IPC as TCP relates to |
| 34 |
IP - all the boring plumbing underneath your communication that makes it |
| 35 |
work at all is already there. It would work best if dbus doesn't become |
| 36 |
yet another way to do IPC, but replaces many of them. Imagine how |
| 37 |
much unbloat you could accomplish if you could remove all the little |
| 38 |
bits of IPC plumbing scattered throughout the average Unix system's |
| 39 |
codebase. |
| 40 |
|
| 41 |
There are many code projects out there that deserves to be maligned to |
| 42 |
the point of painful death, then killed. But I honestly beleive dbus is |
| 43 |
not one of them. |
| 44 |
|
| 45 |
|
| 46 |
-- |
| 47 |
Alan McKinnnon |
| 48 |
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com |
Archives