[Adium-devl] Out of process plugins (was: Distant objects)

[Joe Ranieri]

> A bit of an apple vs. apple-orange-hybrid comparison: We have had a  
> few users (not legions, but a handful) who have been confused by  
> iChat being online while they launched Adium. They thought iChat was  
> not running because they had quit it, but the agent was still  
> running, and it complained that it had been knocked off when Adium  
> connected.

Interesting - they must have explicitly turned that option on - it's  
not on by default.

> I also question whether it's even possible to extricate Adium's back  
> end from its front end. They are quite densely intertwined. It would  
> take quite a lot of heavy lifting to separate them.

I think it's doable. But yeah, I wonder what the advantages to doing a  
background program are... It just sounded like a fun / useful project,  
heh.

> My last worry about the proposed patch is whether it creates any  
> security issues. AFAIK, it'd only be accesible from the same  
> machine, but what damage could an evil process inflict if it could  
> control Adium directly rather than through AS?

You can control the messages that are able to be sent to the objects  
through protocols (NSProtocolChecker). Plus there could be a security  
dialog on connection to the daemon, similar to how plugins are done now.

-- Joe Ranieri