During Akademy 2008, we sat down with Fabrizio Montesi who's working on JOLIE integration in KDE (and Plasma in particular). He explained the mechanics of the technology and what it can do for KDE.

Hi Fabrizio! Can you introduce yourself?

Hi! My name is Fabrizio Montesi, I'm Italian and I work as a computer professional. Recently I have founded (together with my colleague Claudio Guidi), italianaSoftware s.r.l., a company that centers its business around service-oriented software solutions made with JOLIE.

At Akademy you gave a talk about JOLIE, the technology you are working on. Can you explain the purpose of JOLIE?

Well, JOLIE is a programming language for service-oriented computing. It is mostly about communication between applications. Usually, applications have communication mechanisms within themselves - in Qt this is done with the signal-slot mechanism. What it does is essentially this: suppose you have a button, and you click it. That button then tells a part of the application to start doing "its thing", e.g. display an image. Simple.
Now, you might want to have something happen in another applicaton if you hit that button; that's covered in the software world as well, e.g. on Linux/UNIX by DCOP and D-Bus, on Windows by DCOM. The problem is that these technologies are pretty specific and each one has its own set of limitations (among which the most prominent is that some don't work over networks). JOLIE tries to overcome all these limitations and offer a very simple solution for doing what should indeed be simple: "just send this message to that application in that computer".

So JOLIE is like a network-enabled D-Bus?

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