Comments on: GNOME and Web Services

By: Andrew Z

Andrew Z — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:10:06 +0000

For office use, Evolution desparately needs write support for iCalendar calendars stored on WebDAV. It’s an easy, convenient way to share calendars in an office. This feature would really help Evolution replace Outlook.

By: J5

J5 — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 18:00:49 +0000

Ya NAT kind of sucks but there are ways around it plus ipv6 will eventually come (though there still may be hurdles because of security). In any case it is not really an important part of the equation right now. The interesting part is the application interface to enabling these services. The daemon can export them over any manner of transports including jabber.

By: Mark Drago

Mark Drago — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:31:03 +0000

Hey John,

I agree that the Linux desktop is in a unique position to make the internet more of a desktop->desktop world, but there are a few hurdles that will be difficult to overcome. Not the least of which is NAT. NAT has this way of making the client/server paradigm in to a consumer/producer paradigm which is not intrinsic to the internet. But, the idea of having a single daemon which exposes certain DBuS interfaces via XML-RPC is very interesting.

Mark.

By: Murray Cumming

Murray Cumming — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 15:11:53 +0000

Yes, and some standard interfaces for some generic useful web things. What are those things, I wonder?

By: themodernlife

themodernlife — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 14:29:43 +0000

That’s great thinking. I wonder how easily integrated d-bus and avahi are? i mean, if you are talking about exposing d-bus methods to the internet with an xml-rpc bridge, why shouldn’t we do the same via roundez-vous using a dbus-avahi bridge?

“attributed programming” or whatever you want to call it sort of begs for this kind of use-case…

ideal scenario (pseudo code)

@dbus
@webservice
def some_method:
blah lbah

i dunno. i think you’re on the right track as far as where things should be heading.