[DotGNU]Butler = DGEE

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

the Butler is in the current plans a different program than the DGEE but has a
lot of similarities with it. However this is unnecessary, if you think of the
Butler working this way:

When the Butler establishes a connection to a webservice it forks at let's a
child process handle authorization and all that jazz. After authorization the
child process acts as an interface between the UI libs and the webservice.

That is a lot like the way the DGEE handles webservices. That's why I think the
Butler can be replaced with the DGEE. The details have to be worked out, but
this approach seems most logical. It requires an important change in the way we
think about the client however, the client is no more the passive partner like a
webbrowser to a PHP webservice but it becomes a server itself. The User
Interface becomes a set of functionality offered to selected webservices over
the web. The difference between webservice components and webservice
applications essentially disappears!

There is just one small problem, the main GUI lib used at the moment is FOX, but
the FOX message passing system is a little different from the DotGNU one. This
is solved by wrapping the FOX message in a DotGNU message. The message send to a
FOX object would look like this on the DotGNU level:
____OBJECT______MEMBER____ACTION__________CUSTOM_DATA______
("objectname", "handle", "invoke", [selector, message_data])


I imagine the Client DGEE (CDGEE) working like this:

The user gives commands to the CDGEE through a locally running webservice app
(yes I know it's not a webservice if it's not accessible from a network, but you
get the point :-) named Webshell. The CDGEE then creates a webservice process
which accesses the webservice on the server and goes through the whole auth
process. The local webservice process is linked with the UI libs and can thus
provide a User Interface for the remote webservice.

Greetings,

Peter