[ge-talk] Notification Server?

[Simon Kennedy]

Perhaps it's just me but when I thought of a notification server my 
first thought was not a graphical way of informing the user but a 
mechanism to notify applications about events in the system.

For example we currently have a BRoster which manages notification of 
application startup and shutdown; it has its own mechanism for 
notifications. In the future we may have a USB hotplug mechanism. Should 
this also want to broadcast events to interested applications it will 
need a mechanism for doing this. We don't want to end up in a situation 
where for example a photo manipulation application wants to be notified 
of camera insertions and deletions needs to ask the USBRoster, the 
FirewireRoster and any other roster. Instead an application would not 
want to know about the myriad ways of performing this task and use only 
one (it doesn't care about what sort of camera it is) and so we may want 
to standardize the mechanism.

On Linux they have a couple of proposals for doing things like this one 
of which is DBUS. We have one thing, for this mechanism, that Linux does 
not have; As Michael indicated we have BMessages and BMessengers as a 
standard way of sending messages across address spaces (they have to use 
some sort of filey-sockety mishmash.) So we have the standardized 
foundation all we need now is the glitz.

Do we also want a standard way of producing these types of 
notifications? I think way may well do.

We could then have a Notification Server to handle the background task 
and an Information Server to provide the annoying popups.

Regards
Simon Kennedy

	
	
		
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