Subject: Word Services under Gnome?
crawford@goingware.com
Date: Sun Feb 20 2000 - 15:53:13 CST
Hi,
I've been lurking around for a while with the general intention of
helping out real soon now. Should be able to do substantive help
with the macintosh port starting this week or so.
What got me initially interested in AbiWord was a converation at
LinuxWorld in San Jose a while back about putting support for the
Word Services Suite into the BeOS version, and eventually the
Mac version.
I had emailed Richard Stallman something that mentioned Word
Services and said I'd like to get it working under X11 somehow, but
I needed support from the system that I didn't think was there. He
suggested I look at what I could do with Gnome, and I think I might
actually be able to make Word Services work with Gnome.
What I need is interapplication communication that provides
access to the logical structure of documents. What I need to be
able to ask a program is something like "give me the text from the
first paragraph of the document named 'foo'".
In the MacOS, you use the Apple Object Model to roll an Object
Specifier that specifies this using numeric values and parameters
to heirarchically specify the data. The recipient application then
uses the Apple Event calls in the toolbox to resolve this to the
actual data.
In the BeOS, you can do a similar thing using corresponding
specifiers that are BeOS specific. The BeOS provides a shortcut
that's very convenient though - you can provide a "BMessenger"
which encodes the system ID's for a "BHandler" that handlers
"BMessages" and the "BLooper" that the BHandler is installed in.
In word services, the client application (such as AbiWord) sends a
request containing one of these specifiers or messengers to the
server application - usually a spellchecker, but it can be any text
service - a grammar checker, an address book, a text encryptor, a
text-to-speech reader and so on.
From looking at some of the Gnome doc at:
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/whitepapers/Components/gnome-
corba.html
it looks like I might be able to do what I need with Gnome and
CORBA.
So if I can, I'd really like to be able to do this. I'd need a couple of
things - in particular I'm asking you AbiWord folks because this
would need to be an open standard, and I'd need people that had
an interest to help me develop the standard and make sure it
worked well for everybody.
Because AbiWord is free software, I suppose I could just take the
source and stick it in, but I definitely want to develop this as a
cooperative process, as we did on the MacOS and BeOS.
And of course, I'd need some technical help. I've never worked with
GTK+ or CORBA so having someone who knows about such
things would be helpful to me.
You can find out more about Word Services at:
particularly the developer info at:
http://www.wordservices.org/Developers/index.html
and the BeOS info at:
http://www.wordservices.org/Developers/bespec.html
The quickest introduction to word services is in my MacHack '94
paper at:
http://www.wordservices.org/Developers/mhpaper.html
Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com
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