Orca Migrated to Pyatspi
The Mozilla Foundation graciously funded Eitan Isaacson to migrate Orca away from its custom AT-SPI bindings to pyatspi. This was no small feat since Orca's custom AT-SPI bindings were used by nearly every module. Eitan worked very hard to get much of the core of Orca moved over to pyatspi, and then the entire team hammered on a herculean effort to meet our goal of having the first phase done for GNOME 2.21.1.
After the first phase of migrating to pyatspi was complete for GNOME 2.21.1 (yeah team!), the team then began working on a performance analysis to fix any performance problems that cropped up as a result of the migration. As of GNOME 2.21.4, Eitan did a very good job at this and we've been able to bring Orca back -- and better in some cases -- to the performance it was at prior to the pyatspi migration. Cool beans.
This work was important to me because it helped unify a number of relevant users of AT-SPI to a single language binding for AT-SPI. There a few impacts of this:
- There is less code for the community to maintain overall. Dogtail, LDTP, Accerciser, Orca, etc., can all use pyatspi instead of their own custom bindings. Any improvements made to pyatspi will benefit everyone that uses it.
- Activities such as migrating AT-SPI to DBus are simplified due to the reduction of bindings that talk to the AT-SPI.
It was a pleasure to work with Eitan on this. I'm looking so forward to him rolling contracted braille support into Orca. Many thanks to Eitan and the Mozilla Foundation for all of this!
