Dynamic Services?
Dynamic Services?
- Subject: Dynamic Services?
- From: Evan Gross <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 28 Aug 2001 05:34:57 -0400
Hi all,
I've seen some scattered references to "Dynamic Services", but haven't been
able to gather much information on a) just what *exactly* they are and what
they can do (anything a "regular" service can do? Or limited?) or how they
are implemented.
What I'd like to be able to do is provide services from my app, based on
some sort of plug-in (or other dynamically loaded, single-file-or-packaged
user-installable entity). So my app would ideally scan for the existence of
these "Service plug-ins" in a couple of known places (in my own bundle, and
perhaps in Application Support) and somehow let the system know of their
existence.
And that (letting the system know) seems to be a sticky issue. Since an
application's (these services would be provided by a regular AppKit-based
application) services appear to have to be pre-specified in its info.plist,
each NSServices entry fully-formed, well - you see the problem.
Knowing what little I know (just started with Cocoa a couple months ago) the
only thing I can think of would be to figure out the services I can vend
(based on what "service plug-ins" are available and modify my app's
info.plist file when my app launches. YUCK. Besides the fact that you can't
count on having write permission to the app, it seems to me like a bad
solution any way you look at it. Even if I did this, the user would still
need to log out and back in again to see any changes that may have been made
(services added/removed).
I've looked a bit at TickleServices, but it's based on some techniques that
may have been available pre-Mac OS X. It appears to have a daemon process
that updates some sort of "services" file that I doubt exists on OS X.
Is this at all do-able? I'm hoping there's something I don't know about the
Services mechanism that can help me out.
Any advice/pointers would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Evan Gross
Rainmaker Research Inc.
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