The Common Desktop Environment supplies a registration service,
the ToolTalk Messaging Service, that enables an application to find
an available service provider. ToolTalk provides the low-level messaging
infrastructure. A companion mechanism, called the actions system,
provides a consistent abstraction layer on top of both the traditional
UNIX™ command-line interface to applications and the Common
Desktop Environment-recommended ToolTalk interface to applications.
Actions, as semantic entities, are exposed to the end user through
higher levels of software. Both actions and ToolTalk are discussed
in more detail in “Integration
Technologies”.
The desktop contains components that are available through
action and ToolTalk APIs. Examples include GUIs to show a view of
a directory, submit a print job, view the contents of the Trash
Can, edit some text, show help information, compose a calendar appointment,
and compose a mail message.
You can also incorporate actions and
ToolTalk message support into your application so that the application-specific
services they supply are available to the desktop and other applications.
Particularly, applications should provide the composition, viewing,
editing, and printing services for both proprietary and standard
format data. This way, applications that are coded to accept an
extensible set of data types automatically gain more capabilities
as more media handlers are added to the system.
The Common Desktop Environment File Manager,
Front Panel, and
Mailer attachment GUI are examples of such applications.
Media is used as a generic term for anything that can be presented
to the user to convey information. The desktop provides media handlers
for appointments, mail messages, mail folders, text, icons, and
help data. Vendors have extended the desktop with additional media
handlers, including PostScript™, many kinds of image file
formats, and audio data.
Printable version
