GSoC:2008 Service Clients and Language Bindings Details

This is a slightly abridged overview and abstract from my original proposal XMMS2 Service Clients Proposal.pdf:

Overview

Service clients are very simple, but very powerful clients which provide basic services for use in other clients. They are regular clients, which means they connect to and use XMMS2 in the same way as any other client, but they also publish methods with which to access their services in other clients. Regular clients, or even other service clients, since they are regular clients, too, can call these methods and benefit from the services provided.

The idea fits in with the XMMS2 philosophy in that each service client does one thing and does it well, much like how the XMMS2 server handles playback and mediainfo well while clients focus on a specific user interface. Service clients prevent client authors from having to reimplement basic functions in their code by using a common implementation. The benefits go beyond this obvious time and energy savings and also include an increase in quality of services.

Abstract

Last year's Summer of Code provided an implementation of the service client idea by student Ning Shi and his mentor Sébastien Cevey. As of DrLecter, it's still unmerged with the main codebase, there are no language bindings written for it, and only some proof-of-concept clients. Service client code will be brought back up-to-date, some issues fixed, then merged into the main codebase. Then, Ruby bindings will be written. Finally, some service clients will be converted or written anew to ease implementation of common features in various clients.