RE: [Rails-devel] OR updates

[Erik V. <eri...@hc...>]

> > What we need is some kind of messages from the Model to the View
> > about changes of individual values that have taken place 
> > and (possibly) need be reflected in the UI.
> 
> I think you should revisit how we accomplished this for the 
> StockChart.  In StockChart, we just call repaint() whenever 
> the model changes. I don't think there's any good reason why 
> ORWindow needs to be any different.

In fact, we call refreshStockPanel(), which completely
rebuilds the stock chart.
 
> We don't need any sort of messaging subsystem if painting is 
> *only* dealing with drawing the objects that represent the 
> model as efficiently as possible. We can call repaint() as 
> often as we need to.

But we don't.

> So far, the painting code hasn't shown any indication that 
> it's too slow to be repeatedly repainted.

Maybe not.

But I wonder how this all would work out in a distributed environment.
If the server would only send a message to all clients to have them all 
completely rebuild themselves, that will cause a lot of calls to the server!

It seems to me that atomic update messages from server to client
would do a more efficient job.

Now I don't know for sure if Observer/Observable plus RMI would do that job,
but I think it has a good chance.

Erik.