ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2013-10-23 at 11:09 +0200, Thomas Voß wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 8:45 PM, Rasmus Eneman <Rasmus@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>my point of view is still that forcing every little small app to bring its
> >> own
> >>daemon will:
> >>
> >>a) scare off people for writing apps for our platform as the communication
> >>overhead between a service and the UI is a huge effort and easy to mess up.
> > Android have AIDL (http://developer.android.com/guide/components/aidl.html)
> > to help developers with this, I have used it and have to say that it's very
> > simple
> > to use. Hopefully something like this could come to Ubuntu too (it would
> > make
> > sense on the desktop as well).
> >
> 
> AIDL is *another* middleware that helps in implementing an
> out-of-process component model. That being said, we will need
> something comparable. And before people start asking: I think we need
> to help developers with a layer on top of "raw" dbus to make this as
> convenient and easy as possible. We can probably hijack existing
> object hierarchies, but might as well come up with something that is
> less coupled to a specific object model.


I realize that this isn't exactly what you're saying, but I don't think
we want to necessarily use DBus here, at least on a well known bus
(session).  We've restricted the use of well known names (which is good
IMHO) but that makes finding your background service slightly difficult.
It seems like what ever protocol goes across it, doing something that
only relies on flies in the application's cache directory I think would
be more robust.

I think that we also need to ensure that what ever defines the
background service doesn't imply that protocol.  For instance a
background service that just writes to an SQLite DB seems valid to me.

Ted

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