File sharing, locking, etc... between multiple users...

[Jim Ault]

Thanks for the note.  Very glad that my ramblings might have triggered
something valuable for you.

Something more.  Those not interested.. . stop reading now.  You won't miss
a thing  :-)

As you may have realized by now, I tried to use some of the HCard ways of
handling stacks to think about work flow organization where each part of the
process becomes an object that only deals with its children and next level
parent(s).

Children know how to locate their parent(s) at any moment, therefore when
the parent changes, the child can reference that change and respond
accordingly.

In the work flow sense, a child is actually the individual worker executing
a step in the work flow, so there can be two workers each using their own
child to update to the same parent or group of parents.  These parents can
be at the same level, each having a different function.

An example would be a staff meeting event.  Work flow would include
scheduling, updating, building the agenda, sending notices to attendees and
other parties, inviting comments, publishing the list of attendees,
post-meeting minutes, notification of interested parties, archiving for
future reference, scheduling follow-up.

All of these parts could be a parent and the child would be the particular
staff meeting on Thur at 9 am [metaphor would be a card in a 'scheduled
event stack].  It would know that it needed to report to the parent that
handled any scheduling, the one that handled invitations, the one that
handled archiving of company information, etc.

In this scheme, 
...the child would ask each parent "Are there any updates to me (running on
Rebecca's computer [metaphor would be a card on her computer that would show
the data from the card in the 'scheduled event stack')?"

 ...the child would say "Here is the revised list of attendees for your
consideration, from me (running on Mark's computer), which submits the new
data to the parent for updating and availability to any object that
requests/requires it.  Basically , you have a lot of 'landing zones' for
data that is handled by one-or-more parents.

Here the child does not know or care what the parent does with the new data.
Time and date stamping is essential.
I would encourage designing, building, and embedding an audit trail now to
help with the debugging and design.  It is an invaluable tool.

Hypercard of course.

Hope you head stops swimming over the weekend.

Jim Ault
Las Vegas

On 2/17/06 7:37 AM, "Jonathan Lynch" <jonathandlynch at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just want to say, Jim, your ideas on this topic are greatly appreciated.
> 
> Please share all of the here, as many of us might use them, or adapt them to
> our needs.
> 
> Take care,
> 
> Jonathan
>