Given that, I was able to use dbus to come up with a quick solution for a department feature in an afternoon using Pidgin's libpurple dbus bindings through purple-remote to create a presence tracker and simple announcement bot with bash.
A little digging into Pidgin's DBUS Howto gave me all the documentation that I needed. It just took a lunch hour to have something functional up and running without any real in depth programming knowledge required or needed. In an afternoon, I'd hacked up an RSS feed that showed everyone in the department's current presence as reported by their IM status and that feed could then be consumed by the required apps.
I don't know about dbus' other merits or flaws, but it did help me solve a specific problem quickly. This was a dead simple use case though.
At the time, I assumed that people more knowledgeable than me could do a hell of a lot more with it.
Given that, I was able to use dbus to come up with a quick solution for a department feature in an afternoon using Pidgin's libpurple dbus bindings through purple-remote to create a presence tracker and simple announcement bot with bash.
A little digging into Pidgin's DBUS Howto gave me all the documentation that I needed. It just took a lunch hour to have something functional up and running without any real in depth programming knowledge required or needed. In an afternoon, I'd hacked up an RSS feed that showed everyone in the department's current presence as reported by their IM status and that feed could then be consumed by the required apps.
I don't know about dbus' other merits or flaws, but it did help me solve a specific problem quickly. This was a dead simple use case though.
At the time, I assumed that people more knowledgeable than me could do a hell of a lot more with it.