[Kde-accessibility] Proklam and KMouth

[Bill Haneman]

On Mon, 2002-09-23 at 19:47, Olaf Jan Schmidt wrote:
> Hi Bill, hi Pupeno, hi Peter,
> 
> Bill, thank you very much for your additional information about 
> gnome-speech and GAP. From reading the GAP website and the archives of 
> kde-accesibility, I understand that there have already been a lot of 
> thoughts how to make GAP toolkit independent. I appreciate this very 
> much.
...

Olaf and Pupeno:

Thanks very much for all your time, and for looking at a project that at
first may seem to be very independent of your needs.  I agree that there
seems to be a great opportunity to cooperate here, and I'd like to do
all that I can to help do that.

I will reply to some of your other points in detail later (for today I
must log off :-).

But in short, I think that there are several different ways that we can
ensure that our projects work together and that the maximum flexibility
and power is offered to users on KDE, GNOME, and other platforms as
well.

Certainly Proklam could use a gnome-speech plugin as a backend, and
gnome-speech could also use or offer a Proklam backend, if perhaps
Proklam were to support some devices which gnome-speech does not.  The
key to making either of these solutions work easily is to agree on a
common general API, which is why IDL is a nice starting point.  For us
we go from there to generate CORBA bindings, but or course IDL can be
used to make Java bindings or be used as the basis for other IPC
mechanisms.  In principle IDL is implementation-dependent, it's only
because CORBA uses it extensively that it is associated with CORBA, but
it isn't exclusive to CORBA.

So if our APIs are close enough, the possibilities for how the two
architectures plug together are much more flexible, and much less work
is involved in writing either kind of plugin.  This means of course that
we need to try to find IDL that meets the needs that we've both
identified, i.e we should make sure we haven't "left anything out" of
our IDL which would be important to Proklam and vice-versa.

best regards,

Bill