Sun/Mac Interoperation

[Marc Stiegler <marcs>]

First of all, I have been sloppy in my terminology. The text documents
"on the sun" and "on the mac" are of course both stored in the sun
backend. Any of these pooled text documents could contain links to a
CadDoc--but such links can only be constructed on the Sun, and if you
try to traverse to the CadDoc on the Mac, you'll get some kind of
alert that there ain't no software to display it.

This does bring up a number of little issues we haven't thought through
at all (unless someone has been thinking again without telling me! :-)

1) How do we start a link in a document handled by one application, and
end the link in another? It seems to me we'll need to be able to share
the "hanging link handler" as a minimum.

2) When you traverse in application A to a document that application A does
not understand, how does A determine which other application to invoke,
and how does it pass enough info across to the other application so that
the other application knows what to do with it?

These are nasty little problems, solvable in a hundred ways, but now we
have to pick one way and implement it.

Greg, in principle a text document can include an AutoCAD document--but
it won't be very effective this time out. Someday we'll have to promulgate
tools that make it easy for multiple applications to share a single window
(you, AutoCAD, take that part of the window and draw and edit, while you,
InfoFactory, take the other part), but I doubt we'll do this in
October (unless someone knows a REALLY CHEAP way of doing this).

--marcs