[chimera-dev] publish collaboratory idl files?

[Greg Couch]

On Wed, 1 Feb 2006, David E. Konerding wrote:

> I was wondering if it would be possible to publish the Collaboratory IDL
> files?  I would like to make a remote control application for chimera,
> but don't want to use the puppet extension.  It seems like a nice way to
> do this would be to use the Collaboratory interface.

That's an intriguing suggestion.  We consider the Collaboratory IDL an 
private internal interface and highly subject to change (e.g., from 
release to release and we're thinking about switching to a non-CORBA 
mechanism to minimize firewall issues).  So while it would be possible to 
control chimera via the CORBA interface, it would be a lot of work for 
something that is likely to break.

The puppet extension is the prefered remote-control mechanism.  It is 
publicly exposed via the --send command line argument.  And you can send 
files to a running chimera, including Python .py files and chimera command 
.cmd files.  If chimera isn't running, it will start up with the given 
files (although not in the background yet).

So what is the real issue?  Do you want a continuous remote interface to 
chimera?  Is the overhead of the --send option a problem?  Please tell us. 
There are probably alternative solutions that are better.

 	- Greg