Domicel Q & A

How does Domicel know how to act?

Q:

In the example you describe where the user drops a TV object onto a spreadsheet object, how will the TV object know how to act? Where will the functionality be that determines that numbers need to be diplayed, even for something as simple as price?

As I'm picturing it, the TV object will have a price field and the Spreadsheet object will grab it. But what if the TV object is written with a "List Price" and "Sales Price?" How will the Spreadsheet object know about them, and understand that it should display them?

In other words, I see the interoperability as a major issue -- even though you're moving the work of software design to the software designers, they are still going to have to work together nearly ALL the time in order to make effective integration -- the authors of the spreadsheet program will have to interface with the authors of, well, every single object that wants to use the spreadsheet object, won't they?

A:

The spreadsheet will simply create a column for each attribute of the object. It doesn't need to know what those attributes mean to a sentient user.

The great thing about human-mediated ad-hoc integration (which is what I'm advocating) is that there's always a human around to make the connection!