Re: COM on mac

FROM : j o a r
DATE : Tue Jan 14 23:18:23 2003

On Tuesday, Jan 14, 2003, at 20:31 Europe/Stockholm, Andy Satori wrote:

> Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree.  Ultimately I suspect the
> Rendezvous
> is going to help this situation, but as far as I can tell, it helps
> with the
> discovery process, but doesn't provide any tools for abstracting away
> from
> having to write a full client and server TCP implementation using BSD
> sockets, and making the decisions that that kind of design entails.


Perhaps you could try to phrase your question in less general terms.
Your latest example talks about communicating with an "AppServ", and
not an instance of "Word" as in your first example - I bet that the
proposed solutions would differ between these two scenarios in the
typical case.

Do you already know what application it is that you want to interact
with? In that case it would help us to know what RPC capabilities it
has. Or perhaps it is an application that you plan to write yourself,
or can influence? Will it run on a Mac, can it use Cocoa frameworks?

You are right in thinking that Rendezvous only helps with discovering
services, selecting a method to communicate to the located services are
not included in Rendezvous - but there are several methods available to
you in the system provided frameworks.
RPC-XML / SOAP is of course the current choice for the
buzzword-compliant developer - and the one with least platform specific
dependencies. For this purpose there are resources available in both
CoreFoundation (C) and AppleScript IIRC.
If you OTOH can use Cocoa on both ends, and doesn't have high
performance requirements, I would suggest that you take a look at
Distributed Objects (DO) in the docs - it's certainly the easiest thing
to have up and running, and the most transparent, for a Cocoa
programmer.

Using DO your example code could look something like this in Cocoa:

id server = [NSConnection rootProxyForConnectionWithRegisteredName:
@"AppServ" host: @"my.server.com"];
NSArray *books = [server getVendorList];

j o a r
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | <email_removed>
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.