Re: External behaviors (was Re: MISC: Inlined Sound Support)

Brian Behlendorf ([email protected])
Mon, 17 Apr 1995 19:34:27 -0800 (PST)


On Mon, 17 Apr 1995, Mike Roberts wrote:
> Any external language have some way to modify the scene graphs, which can be
> language specific (<Gets on soapbox> of cource, life would be much easier if
> language designers had a defined API for the manipulation of the scene graph, as
> well as a defined mechanism to get events back from the VRML browser <gets off
> soapbox>).

Yes, this is the crux of the issue. We don't really need to specify
anything about the scripting language itself, it's the binding that
is important. And as you alluded to before, this "binding" should be the
same mechanism as, or at least conceptually similar to, the mechanism by
which a browser calculates how sound files are propagated through the
scene. There are platform-specific proposals for this binding
(AppleEvents, OLE, Xevents), and high-level object models (CORBA), but
there's no solid "yes, that's the right way to do it" answer, yet. The
worst thing we can do now is find some shortcut answer which hinders us
in the long run. Let's try and do this right the first time :)

Brian