Work is starting on the port of the AT-SPI framework to D-Bus. Codethink are, graciously, being funded by Nokia to undertake the work. Mike Gorse is working on the project full time, as part of his work for Novell.

Mike has got alot done and there are some initial D-Bus specifications, as well as alot of code on the ATK to AT-SPI adapter side. For the moment we’ll both be working in a git repository on Codethink. Hopefully we will be able to move the code into a repository on freedesktop one day.

The AT-SPI D-Bus work is important as it is attempting to eliminate the last vestiges of CORBA from Gnome and at the same time help with cross desktop accessibility. I’m hopeful that despite the transition we will be able to create a flexible and performant D-Bus protocol for AT-SPI.

I’ve written before about our results on D-Bus vs CORBA performance, done in preparation for this project. The results were a bit shocking for the D-Bus team so there need to be some significant changes to the IPC for things to remain snappy.