D-BUS is a message bus system, a simple way for applications to talk to one another.

I was looking for a better way of doing inter-process communication (IPC) and I stopped to take a look at D-BUS. After playing with it for a few days and seeing it in action via beagle, I decided it was worth using.

I’ve started work on xchat-dbus, and X-Chat plugin to expose plugin functionality via D-BUS. The advantage to this is that other applications could interface with X-Chat without having to use a plugin and then find a way to communicate with that.

This started out as an idea to create a simple applet that would provide alerts via the notification area. I found one such applet, but it was overly complicated and didn’t work well. I started to write an X-Chat plugin to do it, but then I realized how much easier (and ultimately more useful) a D-BUS plugin would be. Plus, this will let me dig deeper into D-BUS and hopefully I’ll get a better grasp on it’s internals.