[sugar] Sharing data between activities.

[Ivan Krstić]

On Aug 23, 2007, at 9:58 PM, Carlos Neves wrote:
> So the only writable common ground will be the datastore/journal?  
> Isn't that a bit harsh?

I don't think so. It's the correct decision for the majority of  
applications; the rest are mostly corner cases, and we can iterate on  
finding a good solution for dealing with those.

> I know that there is a new usage paradigm on the make here but  
> shouldn't there be some kind of file based, invisible unless  
> searched specifically (not the journal) place for generic data,  
> i.e. files?

There is, for each activity's own files, and the duplicate file  
detector will do a good job of letting activities share references to  
the same _known_ set of data files if needed. The use case of sharing  
the same _actual_ file(s), such as a database, isn't yet supported.  
Neither is the case of a set of shared resources with a single point  
of update. The former is trivially implementable, but I'd have to  
carefully think about the implications.

> But Launchers are one thing so strongly opposed by many. You are  
> puzzling me, what is your opinion on having a Launcher frontend for  
> multiple activities (ignore the multiple things under the same  
> activity x multiple separate activities argument).

For multiple disparate activities, it simply won't work at all. For  
the case where you have three activities that you're distributing  
together and you really want them sharing and mutating the same data  
files, a combined single activity with a launcher might be the way to  
go from an engineering point of view, though Design might still give  
you dirty looks about it. :)

--
Ivan Krstić <krstic at solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org