Re: Lengthy questions from a newbie

FROM : James Bucanek
DATE : Tue Jun 20 02:24:31 2006

Ben Einstein wrote on Monday, June 19, 2006:

>2) Remote views. Another major feature that has us stumped: building a
>separate mini-application that allows users on a remote system to fully
>interact (in a controlled manner) with the primary interface. For example, one
>system has 3 or 4 sections of questions, and a remote operator can view and
>answer these questions section by section via a little window at the bottom of
>the remote system, using previous and next buttons to navigate through the
>main screen. The main screen must still be accessible and updated when the
>answers on the remote system are entered. I figure a custom view is best, but
>we're completely lost about where to start with such a thing.


I'm not entirely clear on what you're trying to do, but you should check out Distributed Objects.

Distributed Objects allows one computer to become an "object server". Client applications connect to the server (intra-machine or across the Internet) and obtain a proxy to the object vended by the server. The proxy object that exists in the client applications acts almost identically to a locally created object of the same class, but messages sent to it are actually executed on the server's instance of the object.

So, let's say you've developed a client application the puts up a window, collects some data, and performs some action when the user clicks on a button. The action for that button sends a message (along with parameters gathered from the input fields) to some object -- let's call it theWorker -- to do the work. In the regular application theWorking is an object created locally.

Take that same application you just wrote and make one simple change: Instead of creating the worker object locally (theWorker = [Worker new]) you get a proxy to a worker object on a remote computer (theWorker = [remoteConnection rootProxy]). The rest of the application works exactly the same, but when messages are sent to theWorker, they magiaclly get transported to the server where the message is executed.

It's very powerful stuff.

<file:///Developer/ADC%20Reference%20Library/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/DistrObjects/index.html>
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James Bucanek