summary of the aKademy meetings

[Marco Lohse]

Scott Wheeler wrote:
> On Tuesday 07 September 2004 8:28, Marco Lohse wrote:
> 
>>ok, I have quickly looked at the code. It's basically a 'one-to-one' 
>>binding, right? The idea was to provide every single feature of 
>>Gstreamer for C++, right? However, it seems that these bindings were 
>>never really completed, right?
> 
[..]

> 
> 
>>And, they will have  
>>to be maintained and updated by a human. And, - since all this is done 
>>by human beings - someone will have to fix the bugs introduced in these 
>>processes (and you will have bugs, since writing such, well, 
>>'repetitive' code usually leads to a lot of bugs!). And, you will have 
>>to provide documentation for the bindings (do not assume that C++ 
>>developers are willing to read the documentation for the C API!). And, 
>>you will have to provide some examples/helloworlds. At least, if you 
>>want to establish this API as some sort of 'standard'. At least, if you 
>>want to support the development of all these more advanced applications 
>>mentioned (e.g. audio recording/mixing)
>>
>>So, to summarize, this will be a huge effort - I wonder why people are 
>>willing to invest so much effort into this and not into some sort of 
>>'meta-architecture', something on-top of other frameworks, something 
>>that adds some more value through abstraction.
> 
[..]

> 
> In a sense this reads to me like "Building a house is hard, but skyscrapers 
> are cool; why not build one of those?"  ;-) 

well, I would prefer: "why build another tent around some existing tent? 
Why not build a house around the tent, so we will be warm in the winter, 
and we can easily use another tent inside our house in cases we do not 
like the old tent anymore, or we can even play with both tents at a time" ;)

But seriously, let us consider another example for 
abstraction/meta-architecture: Qt. From my understanding, Qt is (also) a 
wrapper for lower-level interfaces. It is no one-to-one mapping. It does 
provide abstraction. Therefore, it works with different underlying 
lower-level interfaces. That is possible because different underlying 
lower-level interfaces provide a set of common facilities.

Yes, I know, some people argueed that the multimedia meta-architecture 
can only offer the 'common denominator', as Ronald said. But what is the 
common denominator? Why is that not sufficient for the multimedia 
framework for KDE? (Sure, it is not sufficient for all possible 
applications out there.)

Have fun, Marco.