🚀 go-pugleaf

ralph@cbnewsj.cb.att.com (Ralph Brandi) writes:
>Did anyone else notice the glaring omission of Publish and Subscribe
>from the list of features in 2.0?  Did they just forget to mention
>it, or is Claris really planning on shipping FMPro 2.0 without the
>feature?
>
>Ralph Brandi     ralph@mtunp.att.com     att!mtunp!ralph

Ralph,

While I am not speaking in any official capacity, I would like to point
to that Pub/Sub is an extremely complex issue for database applications
and is fraught with weird cases and fallen user expectations.
Pub/Sub, as it is defined by Apple was designed with text and pictures in
mind.  It manages to work reasonably well for spreadsheets too, but
fails miserably when confronted with databases.  Since Apple initially 
introduced Pub/Sub in '89, we have repeatedly pointed out these problems 
to Apple.
When it comes to publishing records in a multi-user database, one must ask 
"What does the user think she is publishing?"
When a user performs a query and publishes the result is she:
  1) Publishing all records which satisfy the query criteria?
  2) Publishing the particular records which are selected by the query?
  3) Publishing the formatted output (report) which is displayed on her 
     database screen?
Establishing the proper user expectation and presenting a clear interface
for this problem is clearly not a simple matter of drawing a bordered box!

Record locking and access privileges issues further complicate things.
And not least, there is a need for a standard format for exchanging rich 
tabular data.

When designing with these considerations in mind, one soon has several 
menu items, option dialog boxes, and a database maintenance morass.
Perhaps there will eventually be some support for warm-linking with databases,
but I suspect most developers will turn their attention to avoiding
"glaring omissions" in more pressing functional areas.

Brendan McCarthy
Database Engineering, Claris Corp.
brendan@clarisii.com