Re: blocking Control

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Jacob,

On Fri, 2003-12-12 at 18:02, Jacob Perkins wrote:
> I'm planning on implementing a (Bonobo) Control that may block. The
> blocking time is completely dependent on the individual system/user setup,
> could be 'instant', could be 5 seconds or more.

	Ok; interesting. What precisely is going to block ? presumably not some
GUI rendering operation.

> So, my question for the experts is whether this control should be provided
> through a shlib or exe factory?

	Well; if you run it as an exe factory, there are some extra overheads,
but it will not block the main app (unless you're trying to do multiple
non one-way CORBA requests to it while it's in it's blocked state ;-).
OTOH, only 1 user of the remote exe will get this behavior, the others
(as soon as they require round-trip communication) will block too.

> shlib may require apps using the control to implement threading so the
> rest of the app doesn't block.
> But, it is extremely likely that there will be multiple requests coming in
> from one or more apps so if it was an exe, then I may need thread it.
> So, any suggestions on which method is 'best'?

	Sure; simple way to solve the problem in-proc in Gnome 2.5+ is to have
a separate thread that does the blocking part of your work, and
implement a simple CORBA interface in-proc that calls to that across the
threads - thus doing all the work in-process, and isolating the blocking
bit. You can also do in-process async calls, to avoid blocking if
necessary.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael ximian com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot