Bonobo is a component model for creating reusable software components and compound documents. It was created by the company Ximian

Ximian

Ximian was a company that provided free software desktop applications for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. Ximian was founded by Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman in October, 1999, and was bought by Novell on August 4, 2003...

 (now part of Novell

Novell

Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...

) for compound document

Compound document

In computing, a compound document is a document type typically produced using word processing software, and is a regular text document intermingled with non-text elements such as spreadsheets, pictures, digital videos, digital audio, and other multimedia features...

s used in GNOME

GNOME

GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...

.

Bonobo was designed and implemented to address the needs and problems of the free software community for developing large-scale applications. It is inspired by Microsoft's OLE

Object Linking and Embedding

Object Linking and Embedding is a technology developed by Microsoft that allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. For developers, it brought OLE Control eXtension , a way to develop and use custom user interface elements...

 and is quite similar to it. Bonobo components are analogous to KParts in KDE

KDE

KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...

. Bonobo is based on the CORBA

Common Object Request Broker Architecture

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture is a standard defined by the Object Management Group that enables software components written in multiple computer languages and running on multiple computers to work together .- Overview:CORBA enables separate pieces of software written in different...

 architecture. Bonobo can, for instance, be used to embed an HTML component to show some text or an SVG

Scalable Vector Graphics

Scalable Vector Graphics is a family of specifications of an XML-based file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and dynamic . The SVG specification is an open standard that has been under development by the World Wide Web Consortium since 1999.SVG images and their...

 component to display statistics taken from a database.

Available components are:

• the Gnumeric
  Gnumeric
  Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME Free Software Desktop Project. Gnumeric version 1.0 was released December 31, 2001. Gnumeric is distributed as free software under the GNU GPL license; it is intended to replace proprietary and other spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft...
  
   Spreadsheet
• a PostScript
  PostScript
  PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...
  
   viewer (ggv)
• a PDF
  Portable Document Format
  Portable Document Format is an open standard for document exchange. This file format, created by Adobe Systems in 1993, is used for representing documents in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems....
  
   viewer (xpdf
  Xpdf
  Xpdf is an open-source PDF viewer for the X Window System and Motif.Xpdf runs on practically any Unix-like operating system. Xpdf can decode LZW and read encrypted PDFs. The official version obeys the DRM restrictions of PDF files, which may prevent copying, printing, or converting some PDF files...
  
  )
• an SVG viewer (gill)

Planned deprecation

The GNOME release has officially deprecated Bonobo sometime since GNOME 2.4, and developers have been advised to use or switch to an alternative such as D-Bus

D-Bus

In computing, D-Bus is a simple inter-process communication open-source system for software applications to communicate with one another. Heavily influenced by KDE2–3's DCOP system, D-Bus has replaced DCOP in the KDE 4 release. An implementation of D-Bus supports most POSIX operating...

.

See also

• Portable object
  Portable object (computing)
  In distributed programming, a portable object is an object which can be accessed through a normal method call while possibly residing in memory on another computer. It is portable in the sense that it moves from machine to machine, irrespective of operating system or computer architecture...
  
   cross language cross platform Object Model definition
• CORBA
  Çorba
  Chorba , ciorbă , shurpa , shorpo , or sorpa is one of various kinds of soup or stew found in national cuisines across Middle East...
  
   Common Object Request Broker Architecture, cross language cross platform object model
• Freedesktop.org
  Freedesktop.org
  freedesktop.org is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free software desktop environments for the X Window System on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat in March 2000.The organisation focuses on the user....
  
   D-Bus
  D-Bus
  In computing, D-Bus is a simple inter-process communication open-source system for software applications to communicate with one another. Heavily influenced by KDE2–3's DCOP system, D-Bus has replaced DCOP in the KDE 4 release. An implementation of D-Bus supports most POSIX operating...
  
   current open cross language cross platform Object Model
• KDE
  KDE
  KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...
  
   KPart KDE component framework
• XPCOM
  XPCOM
  XPCOM is a cross-platform component model from Mozilla. It is similar to Microsoft COM and CORBA. It has multiple language bindings and IDL descriptions so programmers can plug their custom functionality into the framework and connect it with other components.-The model:XPCOM is one of the main...
  
   Mozilla applications cross Platform Component Object Model
• COM
  COM
  COM is the original, yet still common, name of the serial port interface on IBM PC-compatible computers. It might not only refer to physical ports, but also to virtual ports, such as ports created by bluetooth or USB-to-Serial adapters....
  
   Microsoft Windows only cross language Object Model
• DCOM Distributed COM, extension making COM able to work in networks
• Common Language Infrastructure
  Common Language Infrastructure
  The Common Language Infrastructure is an open specification developed by Microsoft and standardized by ISO and ECMA that describes the executable code and runtime environment that form the core of the Microsoft .NET Framework and the free and open source implementations Mono and Portable.NET...
  
   current .Net cross language cross platform Object Model
• IBM System Object Model SOM, a component system from IBM used in OS/2
• Java Remote Method Invocation
  Java remote method invocation
  The Java Remote Method Invocation Application Programming Interface , or Java RMI, is a Java application programming interface that performs the object-oriented equivalent of remote procedure calls ....
  
   (Java RMI)
• Internet Communications Engine
  Internet Communications Engine
  The Internet Communications Engine, or Ice, is an object-oriented middleware that provides object-oriented Remote Procedure Call, grid computing and Publish/subscribe functionality developed by ZeroC and dual-licensed under the GNU GPL and a proprietary license...
  
  
• Foreign function interface
  Foreign function interface
  A foreign function interface is a mechanism by which a program written in one programming language can call routines or make use of services written in another. The term comes from the specification for Common Lisp, which explicitly refers to the language features for inter-language calls as...
  
  
• Calling convention
  Calling convention
  In computer science, a calling convention is a scheme for how subroutines receive parameters from their caller and how they return a result; calling conventions can differ in:...
  
  
• Application programming interface
  Application programming interface
  An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
  
   - API
• Application Binary Interface
  Application binary interface
  In computer software, an application binary interface describes the low-level interface between an application program and the operating system or another application.- Description :...
  
   - ABI
• Comparison of application virtual machines
  Comparison of Application Virtual Machines
  This article lists some software virtual machines that are typically used for allowing application bytecode to be portably run on many different computer architectures and operating systems. The application is usually run on the computer using an interpreter or just-in-time compilation...
  
  
• SWIG
  SWIG
  SWIG is an open source software tool used to connect computer programs or libraries written in C or C++ with scripting languages such as Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Tcl, and other languages like C#, Java, Modula-3, Objective Caml, Octave, and Scheme...
  
  opensource automatic interfaces bindings generator from many languages to many languages