[kde-edu]: dbus question

[Kevin Krammer]

On Friday 08 June 2007, Jason Harris wrote:

> So, what is the XML descriptor file for?  Do I need to add it to SVN and
> modify my CMakeLists.txt as recommended in the above tutorial?  It seems to
> be working fine without the XML file, but it's possible/likely I am missing
> something.

As Josef said it is not strictly necessary.

The applications shows up in the D-Bus viewer because AFAIK the bindings 
generate the introspection data at runtime as well.

The XML file is basically a tool for users of your D-Bus interface. It serves 
both as a specification and description of the functionality your application 
offers and, through code generators, can be used as a base for implementing 
the client side proxy classes.

For example if a developer wants to call KStar's functionality through D-Bus 
and you have an XML file in SVN, they can just checkout/download this file 
and start coding.

If you only have the runtime provided introspection, they need to run KStars 
and extract the information for each D-Bus interface you are exporting.

Additionally, since it is an XML file, you can add XML comments to it. A bit 
like adding doxygen comments to headers, i.e. further describing methods and 
their relationship/dependecies. 

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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