D-BUS Fun

It's the last day of the OpenSync meeting in Amsterdam. Our fantastic organizing and press squad, Fab and Frank, have already spread the word. It has been a productive weekend. Lots of code got written. Armin and Tobias were busy with implementing out-of-process plugins for OpenSync which finally allows to seamlessly sync KDE and which also is needed for applications like the ones from the Mozilla family. I did some polishing on the GUI frontend side and implemented a first version of a D-BUS frontend for OpenSync.

Working with D-BUS was fun. At the beginning it took me a while to find working Qt3 bindings and to understand how D-BUS works, e.g. why you need miles-long command lines to make simple calls. There really are missing some of the conveniences we take for granted because we have tools like dcop or kdcop. But after getting over this initial adversities, I was able to quickly write a first version of a D-BUS service which talks to OpenSync and allows to control the syncing engine externally by using simple D-BUS calls. Again, there are still missing some of the advanced tools that we have for dcop, e.g. the dcopidl compiler, but it's pretty straightforward to work with D-BUS and the Qt3 bindings, so in the end I was quite satisfied. I'm looking forward to having better D-BUS integration and support in KDE.

Now I will get some sandwiches before Fab is getting me to the airport. Many thanks for organizing this meeting. It was a fun ride.