Brett McCoy wrote: > On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 10:18 AM, Thomas Hruska <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> You've run into two of the major weaknesses of Linux: >> >> - A lack of a unified GUI architecture. > > Many Linux afficianados don't see this as a weakness :-)
Most commercial software providers do. But there is wxWidgets. >> - A lack of a unified inter-application architecture. > > The latter isn't entirely true -- inter-application (more precisely, > inter-process) communication has been present in POSIX systems for a > long time. The model is very different then what is on Windows, of Inter-application != inter-process communication. Most COM objects, for the most part, are _in process_. That is, the DLL/EXE gets loaded into the exact same process space as the host process. > are conforming more and more to this. The nice thing about JaCK also > is that it is not GUI based at all (although there are GUI tools to > configure it). Of course, this is an architecture for a specific class > of applications and not a more general one like COM. Most COM objects do not expose a GUI interface nor need one. For example, it is possible to automate Excel to create and manipulate a spreadsheet via COM without ever seeing a single UI component. Although, I'm pretty sure the Office suite exposes out-of-process COM objects but COM is in-process/out-of-process agnostic (although out-of-process method probably uses some evil RPC backend but is "transparent" from the programmer's perspective). The whole point of COM is _automation_ of other applications from your application (hence the phrase "COM automation"). > Of course, higher level distributed architectures are available on > Linux like CORBA and RPC. But who uses that stuff these days? :-) (Apparently Microsoft...they used RPC for implementing UAC in Vista...) -- Thomas Hruska CubicleSoft President Ph: 517-803-4197 *NEW* MyTaskFocus 1.1 Get on task. Stay on task. http://www.CubicleSoft.com/MyTaskFocus/
