[Kde-accessibility] FYI: Public release of UltraSonix (Mercator) source code

[Willie Walker]

It's interesting to see UltraSonix surface again. :-) Many of the
ideas for its fundamental object communication mechanism (RAP) found
their way into the Java Accessibility API (I know this for sure),
which was then used as an idea factory for the AT-SPI (I believe).

The idea behind the remote access protocol (RAP) was to expose the Xt
widget object hierarchy and events to external agents.  When we were
doing the work, we called it "Editres on Steroids," for those of you
who remember the editres protocol of X Windows.  This was all done in
a world without CORBA and without an object-oriented language, but it
seemed to fair OK and Mercator was a rather interesting project.

We hand-rolled RAP into Motif and other Xt-based toolkits (e.g.,
athena), and it worked fairly well.  Of course one tries to develop
for the generic, but we were in an Xt world and RAP is indeed
influenced by the Xt design.

At one point Marty Geier was trying to roll RAP into the official X
offering, but I think time, money, and patience wore out, especially
when faced with people inventing and promoting new GUI toolkits that
were not based on Xt.

So...I guess one might say Mercator/UltraSonix and RAP live on, but
mostly as ideas that helped foster the creation of our current
accessibility solutions.  We've learned a fair amount since then,
however, and my recommendation would be to work to make our "new and
improved" world more accessible.

Will