Using AT-SPI from IronPython (1)

This adventure started when Jim Hugunin mentioned System.Windows.Automation library new in .NET 3.0.

GUI test automation and assistive technology (such as screen readers) share some common needs. While UI Automation is named after the former, AT-SPI is named after the later. AT-SPI, which stands for "Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface" -- this is the first of lengthy acronyms that will appear in this post -- is an accessibility standard for Unix/X world. Initially developed by the GNOME project, now it is also supported by Java, Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, and Qt 4.

While Microsoft-Novell interoperability agreement announced an intention to implement UI Automation on Linux (see above Wikipedia links for details), that's not available today on my Debian GNU/Linux desktop. So I looked for a way to use AT-SPI from IronPython on Mono.

First thing I did was to install at-spi package from the Debian repository. That was obvious... Less obvious was how to use it after installation, especially because I am not using GNOME desktop (I am an IceWM user). After some search, I added following two lines to my .xsession.

export GTK_MODULES=gail:atk-bridge
/usr/lib/at-spi/at-spi-registryd &

Now AT-SPI has an accessibility broker which clients talk to, and it talks CORBA. CORBA, which stands for (I warned you) "Common Object Request Broker Architecture", is like a big brother of IPC mechanisms. CORBA has been around for a long time, and while it is sometimes accused of bloat, its bloat is nothing compared to certain XML-based "Simple" Object Access Protocol.

So how does one use CORBA from Mono? A little search found a nice project named IIOP.NET, which "allows a seamless interoperation between .NET, CORBA and J2EE distributed objects." Cool. This project even has a support table for Mono on its status page! The download page mentions both binary and source release, but I couldn't find the binary release. No problem. Download the source release, unzip, and run "make -f Makefile.mono". Note that Makefile is for nmake, a Microsoft dialect of make, which is not compatible with GNU make. The build finished with no problem.

Bah, this is getting too long. Let's continue on the next post.