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Re: Best approach to make session based applications
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Re: Best approach to make session based applications


  • Subject: Re: Best approach to make session based applications
  • From: Greg Guerin <email@hidden>
  • Date: Sun, 10 May 2009 19:34:19 -0700

Marcus wrote:

This is something I've been thinking about for a while without making much progress. Let's say that you have an application where you would have one or many "documents" but where the documents itself are not tied to a specific file. Examples of such applications could be terminal emulators or FTP clients.

My first idea was to use a standard single window application and have each "session" controlled by an instance of a controller object. That however would give a lot of manual tasks, things like setting the location of new windows stacked relative to the previous window etc. That's things that I would more of less get for free by using NSDocument and NSDocumentController, but they seem to be more tied to the concept of working with files.

I have done some testing with both methods but I can't decide which one is the most appropriate to use. How would you approach making that kind of application?


It depends.

A typical "document" is a chunk of state, typically editable and persistent. Given that, an app that edits pictures is using "documents", but a terminal emulator isn't. At best, the terminal emulator's "document" is a set of collected settings (colors, type styling, etc.)

On the other hand, a connection to a big SQL database may be backed by a huge persistent state (i.e. the database), but present a less stateful representation to the user, e.g. the possibly ephemeral results from various formulated queries. In that case, the user's perception of "document" might be the queries, not the backing store or a given result set.

So it largely depends on what kind of editable and/or persistable state you have, and how that relates to the user's perception of it. Since you haven't described any of that except in general terms, it's difficult to provide any suggestions that aren't equally general, IMO.

  -- GG

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