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DBus Perl Bindings/2

April 27, 2005 on 8:45 pm | In Hacking, Perl |

After four hours straight of hacking, double-checking references, learning D-Bus and the intricacies of Perl XS programming, I have a preliminary draft of perl bindings for D-Bus.

At the moment, they do nothing, since there isn’t much more than the DBus::Connection object, but they are loading correctely, and the approach is right.

The API should resemble the C one, with a perlish twist. A simple service lister program should be:

  use DBus;
  # we could use this class method...
  my $bus = DBus->get_session_bus;
  # or just the DBus::Bus class...
  #my $bus = DBus::Bus->get('session');
  # the result is the same: $bus will contain a reference to the session bus.
  # but it is also a perl hash reference, so it could hold something, such a string:
  $bus->{service} = 'org.freedesktop.DBus';
  # then we could use them in order to get a service
  my $service = $bus->get_service($bus->{service});
  # $service is also a perl hashref, so we could use it to store some more strings:
  $service->{path} = '/org/freedesktop/DBus';
  $service->{interface} = 'org.freedesktop.DBus';
  # and the get the object:
  my $object = $service->get_object($service->{path}, $service->{interface});
  # here's the remote method call:
  print "Service: $_n" foreach ($object->ListServices);
  0;

I plan to make the low-level bindings work as soon as this weekend.

Future plans: creating a DBus::Object::Subclass pragmatic module, similar to Glib’s Glib::Object::Subclass, that permits the creation of D-Bus aware objects. This could be tricky, but I’m really optimistic.