Instead of editing local files, desktop components and applications
now frequently display dynamically changing data retrieved from the
internet. The GNOME Online Desktop Data Model provides a complete
solution for distributing data and change notifications from the
online.gnome.org server and other internet sources to a daemon running
in the user’s desktop, and from there to individual applications.
The basic innovation of the data model is that a request for data is implicitly a request for future notification of changes to that data. This talk describes why this concept both fits the needs of the Online Desktop user interface and allows for an efficient client-server protocol. Also covered are accessing the data model from your application, and extending the data model to include new types of data.
