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

[Jim Ault]

As a design hint from my little corner of the world, you might think of this
massive challenge along the lines of "event looping".  Every part of the
solution actually operates on its own event loop and timing, sorta like
people attending a cocktail party.

Everyone has there own agenda for enjoying the evening, their own
requirements, preferences and behaviors.  There are, however, limits and
rules.

Be careful of customer-driven design.  I have been there many times and had
to defend the cogent database structure in spite of pressure to 'just make
it work by Friday'.

If you would like a few tips or design ideas, contact me off the list.  I
did an accounting system that worked on the principle of messaging, queues,
conditions, and error checking.  One of the concepts that helped me was
'semaphore' that signaled when tasks needed to be done and when and where
they were located.  Kind of like "Is everybody here" when you don't know who
"everybody" should be.

Object-oriented-style seemed to make sense to me, and I did this in
Hypercard in the late 80's.  Of course, they were all Mac.

Each day was its own object, worried only about its data and results, then
knew when it was to be archived.  Each day was a stack that had its own
functions depending on the day of the week (Fri was different from Wed, etc)
and time of the month (the last week was different than the first).

This scheme allowed me to give each stack all the room it needed to deal
with its nature, including holidays, snow closures, etc.  Each day-stack
would report in on a schedule + when queried.  Each card in the day-stack
served a purpose.  Friday had more cards than a Tue (like employee hours
summary), unless a particular Tue was the end of the month.  You get the
idea.  The "day stack creator" would make my day the way it needed to be,
and then the day was self-sufficient, no matter which computer/hard drive it
was on.  If it were on a back up drive, it would know that (Rinaldi XCMD) by
asking the parent stack for the current drive list locations.

Navigating from stack to stack for the manager and account was a snap, since
that is something that HCard does very well.

I also did their point of sale software in Hypercard, object-oriented-style.
They sold Macintoshes mail order.  They were the first and very successful,
until purchased, then died.  Had fun on the softball team :-)

As usual, this may be of no help whatsoever with your circumstance.  In that
event kindly disregard this morning wake-up tome.

May Task Mage have good Luck Mage.

Jim Ault
Las Vegas


On 2/16/06 6:53 AM, "Jonathan Lynch" <jonathandlynch at gmail.com> wrote:

> The company my wife works for is starting to use Task Mage, because they got
> fed up with MS Project
> 
> This is great, because it gives me a customer driven process for further
> development of Task Mage.
> 
> 
> One of the things they need is to be able to have shared use of tasks, which
> are stored at a remote location and accessed via FTP. This is all very
> doable, and I have made good progress in setting this up.
> 
> But wow, sharing and locking files gets very complicated. The basic model is
> simple, but the details, and cascading changes involved are just a huge pain
> in the bahonkus.
> 
> That's it, that's all I wanted to say... Just venting as parts of my brain
> ooze out of my ears.
> 
> Jonathan
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