🚀 go-pugleaf

OK, today I performed my distributed objects experiment.  Thanks to
everyone who responded and offered to help.  NeXT has one of the best
developer communities thanks to people like you!

OK, the experiment was to determine what the 'range' of distributed
objects was and mainly if they would work over the Internet.  I tried
this during the NS3.0 beta cycle with one of the NeXTedge people (Hi
Greg!), but it was unsucessful due to the wild network security at
NeXT (mainly no packets in or out it seems...).

So today A. Chase Turner (chase@stumpy.cs.orst.edu) and I tried to
determine if distributed objects work over the Internet.  They do.

Just so you get an idea of the pysical locations, I was testing from
the University of Houston (in Texas for our foreign friends) and Chase
was at Oregon State (basically on the other side of the country).

It all just worked.  It took less than a second to make the
connection.  For those who arent familiar with distributed objects
heres the code I used to make the connection:

id server;

server = [NXConnection connectToName:"ChatServer"
	onHost:"stumpy.cs.orst.edu"];


Now server is a local id that represents the object I connected to and
any message I send to it gets sent to the object I connected to on
Chase's machine!!  All automagically!  Over the net!  Cool!

Distributed Objects take all of the pain out of writing distributed or
client/server apps.  You send messages to a remote object *exactly* as
you would to a local object.  I *highly* reccommend that every person
who reads this message and does any development at all read the
Distributed Objects release notes and Intro.

The possibilities for application are limitless, and I'd like to fire
up some discussion on what we can do with this stuff to benefit the
NeXT community at large.

I'm also going to bring up some of the potential problems of having
Distributed Objects work over Internet and what we as developers must
do when we write our distributed apps to overcome those problems.
This has to be done _now_ before DO enabled apps proliferate.

Also, I'm going to put my Chat.app example on the net as soon as I get
a chance.  This is a simple multiuser chat program I wrote with
Distributed Objects.  It's about a page and a half of code (with lots
of comments), so it's very straightforward and easy to grasp.  Much
easier to comprehend than the NeXT provided examples IMHO.

Way to go NeXT for putting such a killer facility into 3.0!!


andrew
-- 
andrew@cubetech.com     | "We shall not cease from exploration
Andrew Loewenstern      |  And the end of our exploring
Cube Technologies, Inc. |  Will be to arrive where we started
                        |  And know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot