Re: DirectFB backend, I'm going for it!

[Fred Kiefer]

Alexander Malmberg wrote:
> Chad Hardin wrote:
> > Speaking of a new deamon, last time I looked,  [NSWorkspace
> > -launchedApplications] only returned the applications which were
> > launched *after* the calling app waas launched.  (It's supposed to
> > return all launched applications).  This looks like daemon material.
>
>
> Again, this depends on the backend/'desktop', and can't be solved in
> -gui alone. It's something of an unresolved architecture problem in
> -gui. I've been talking about a solution (or at least resolution :) in
> #GNUstep for a while. I'll write something for the list.

I don't know, what you did suggest on #GNUstep as I never go there, but 
some months ago I did suggest here on this list to implement this 
feature based on the information gdomap already has about the running 
applications. That way GSServiceManager would ask gdomap for the names 
of all registered objects and could than get a handle onto them. If an 
object is still active and also represents a GSServiceManager, this is a 
connection to a running application. All of this could be packaged up in 
a method on GSServiceManager [-(NSArray*)runningApplications]. This than 
could be used for further operations, eg to get the data for 
launchedApplications or to implement hide/unhiding of other applications.

The benefit of this solution is, that we would not need another GNUstep 
deamon or any additional protocol, just a few extensions on 
GSServiceManager. This also doesn't require an extension of gdomap, we 
just would reuse the code from there, that handles the -N parameter 
(Although a higher level interface would of course be welcome. 
NSSocketPortNameServer springs to mind).
On a system with a lot of none GUI applications running this 
implementation may be a bit slower than a dedicated service for this 
task, but I doubt, that anyone would notice this difference in a typical 
case.