State of WinDBus

[Ralf Habacker]

Olivier Hochreutiner schrieb:
> Hi there,

Hi

> My company is highly interested in using DBus for a multiplatform 
> application (Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Linux, MacOS, ...), and I have to 
> evaluate the state of DBus in general, and WinDBus in particular. So I 
> would be very thankful if a developer can answer a few questions. Note 
> that we will likely contribute to the WinDBus project if we choose to 
> use it... ;-)
>
> Here are my questions:
>
> - How is the WinDBus code synchronized with the main D-Bus project ? 
The winDBus is located in an svn repository (see
http://windbus.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/windbus/), which contains the
actual main dbus sources  and the  win32 changes  to have a full working
win32 code base. The main dbus code is merged in from time to time to be
in sync.

> How much work remains till WinDBus can be merged with the main project ?
There are some patches outstanding and the most effort is required in
discussions with the main dbus team how to implement some parts. One of
the main dbus team estimated the open work to one fulltime.

I assume they will answer ALL your questions, and they are very 
interested in fully supporting win32.

> - How far is WinDBus from being usable for production ?
dbus comes with a test suite which is used on unix to guarantate
production quality and this test suite runs mostly. There are some test
not running and we need help to get them running.

In the pratice I and some other people are using dbus for at least more
than a half year in conjunction with kde on windows without any problems.
> - On UNIX D-Bus uses UNIX sockets to communicate (correct me if I'm 
> wrong). What is used on Windows ?
tcp sockets, there are some efforts to get named pipe running, but some
design problems of the win32 api, we are not able to solve without
bigger changes to the dbus code base let us stop this effort.

> - Do you have any clue if WinDBus can run in a Windows CE environment ?
I was told that windows ce does not have posix function 
open/close/select/... and dbus code uses such function in some area.

> - Do you know if the C++ binding made by OpenWengo will be easily 
> portable to Windows ?
We have already ported the OpenWengo dbus-c++ binding, see in svn
mentioned above. The related test applicationa are running well.

>
> Thanks a lot for your help and for the job done.
>
Nice to hear from you. We are enjoyed to see your interest in this dbus
port.

Ralf