the dbus daemon

funny thing we don't seem to care exactly about those things that we use so often.
software is no exception to this general statement made above.
It was just a week back that I knew about piece of software called dbus,
which seemingly is responsibel for a hell lot of nice things that happen on a desktop.
Not an uncommon sight in open source, it's current version is not even stable.
the API's are not complete (dbus-0.5). Yet there are loads of things that depend on it ..
There is a library called 'libnotify' that uses dbus very tightly. Some of the desktops
like GNOME and KDE run 2 instances of this daemon - one for system use and another
for user. ok now .. all that hype apart ... what is dbus ?
to put it raw - a message passing type of IPC system and a lot lot more than that.
when I said desktops use a dbus daemon for system - i meant things such as event
occurences ... (like .. "new USB device detected", "keyboard unplugged" so on and so forth)
the next question that comes to a logical mind is why .... why ..... WHY dbus ?
(a little more knowledgeable mind spits out words like CORBA, IPC, RPC, SOAP)
the thing is ... dbus is tailorcoded (if i may borrow the expression) for talks between
desktop applications *in a session*. open source CORBA or bonobo is an overkill for
such type of applications....
lot of "nice" things can be done over a desktop with dbus API. should find some time
to poke around this a bit ... hmm...