Data Interaction GUIs

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^TM 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^TM, many kinds of image file formats, and audio data.