ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Thomas Voß <thomas.voss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 3:27 PM, Ted Gould <ted@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
>

Agreed, dbus is just a placeholder here and the actual communication
protocol is TBD. However, it is an implementation detail that we
should avoid to leak to app developers.

> 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.
>

+1, with a default implementation available that eases a developer's life.

Thomas

> Ted
>
>
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