Marc Lehmann wrote: > I'd like to remind people that corba is not the only way to go, as there > is also dco and especially MCOP (which was designed for realtime and > multimedia applications). While CORBA might indeed be the best choice, it > mustn't be choosen just because it has more letters ;-> > > http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde/arts-mcop-doc/ > > (the author couldn't get corba to work reliably (timing constraints) so he > choose to implement something suited for data transfer). It depends largely on what you try to achieve. When you just need a protocol for communication between plug-ins and Gimp that are all running on the same machine, you are free to choose any non standard protocol you like. However, if you want to interface with other applications you must choose a protocol that is a real standard. Basically for the next few years there are only two real candidates in this area: CORBA and (I hate to admit it) Microsoft's DCOM/COM+. I have worked with both, and CORBA is a mature standard with some good implementations. Other protocols like KDE's DCOP or MCOP as you mentioned are not serious standards. Using shared memory is only useful when the two processes are running on the same machine and you could still define a CORBA interface to set it up. So if we want to open Gimp for a distributed environment I think CORBA is the right way to go. Greetings, Ernst
