🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings,

Again, I apologise for the cross posting; however, I need to present this
to the widest reasonable audience.  I hope this doesn't annoy too many
folks.  These are all truly great communities.

I am responsible for making some pretty major modifications (possibly a
complete rewrite; hasn't yet been decided) to a Delphi app that uses IB
databases as its back end.  All the databases are of the same format, and
they are each typically only modified once -- they take events from mock
battles, each database representing one battle.  The data is downloaded
from special-purpose equipment via the serial port.

One possible modification is to make it run in a networked environment. 
Thus, the data would be downloaded at the client machines, into database
files sitting on the server machine.  The app will still need to work in a
single-machine environment, though; so I'm thinking that my architecture
should have some mechanism in it to insulate the app from the particulars
of where a given database file is.

My idea is a very simple DCOM executable, which would sit on the machine
where the IB server was running, and which would translate
database-names-that-the-app-knows about into server-path values.  In this
way, the app wouldn't need to know whether it was on a network or a single
machine.

Is this feasible?  Am I missing something here?  Is this something that I
need to do?  Are there other options for managing access to these
databases, given that it must work (and ideally work the same way, to the
user's view) both over a network and on a single machine?

Of course I realise that this is exactly what the BDE does, but remember
that with this app the list of databases is ever-changing and thus even to
use the BDE will require knowing the physical locations of the files.

I have read a very little about COM, enough to see that my idea above
might work and also to be afraid of using it at all.  For instance, AIUI
there are real difficulties in getting a COM system not only up and
running, but STAYING up and running (re different COM versions and other
programs installing their own COM versions).

My users are non-technical in the extreme.  For example, having to do
something as simple as stop the Interbase server often provokes loud
complaints from them.  They want the installation/upgrade of this app to
require nothing more than putting the CD in and pressing the Next buttons.

Insulating my users from COM-related issues and problems seems well nigh
impossible.  Am I right here?  Is COM the way to go, or am I best to avoid
it like the plague?  What other options are there for this situation?
-- 
Esther Michaels
Please respond to newsgroup; I don't check my mail account