Subject: RE: Help me understand what OpenDoc offers in this situation...
Sent: 8/8/96 3:44 PM
Received: 8/8/96 4:01 PM
From: Chris Hunt, chris_hunt@yes.optus.com.au
Reply-To: ODF Interest, ODF-Interest@CILabs.ORG
To: OpenDoc Development Framework Discussion List, ODF-Interest@CILabs.
Serge wrote:
"Interesting! We are doing something very similar. I also choosed to use
Apple Events because of MacOS 8. How does your part server works? Is it a
separate background-only application? What do you use the name space
manager for?"
I have to be careful here not to mislead people... whilst I'm certainly writing my product, most of it is on the design bench. However, I have embarked on the part server.
My part server is implemented as an OpenDoc part editor given that I saw it serving other part editors within the scope of a document i.e. it does not need to serve part editors across multiple documents. The part server will probably end up with no UI (I'm still not decided on this given previous e-mails and controversy in this area) and will register itself against the document using the name space manager when it initialises. Part editors can then subsequently query the name space manager for a reference to the part server. If the part server has not been registered, a part editor will be able to call some factory method that creates the part server.
The part server will be communicated with via AppleEvents. Since I see no real extra effort for the part server to support AppleScript, it will. This is the contraversial bit that was previously discussed; it was argued that those things that do not have a UI should not be scriptable. My resistance stems from the part server not wanting to access any co-operative services (such as the UI) so that, in future, it can run as a separate, re-entrable task; this will also depend on other things like the OpenDoc storage unit system becoming re-entrant...
