At 12:43 16/12/2000 +0000, rvj wrote:
>Belated - many thanks for reply
>
>I had been thinking along the lines of a totally chrome driven application
>shell.
>
>I had assumed access to DLLs within JARS possible, but impractical for
>preformance reasons.
>
>i.e. a single external DLL which redirects access to the appropriate DLL
>within one or more JARs (decompress/load DLL on the fly)
>
>But this sound like your private file system solution?
It does but remember that for DLLs to be loaded they have to be visible to
the user loading them, whether its in a private file system or not. The
only real advantage of private file systems is where you need a very
efficient storage granularity, because once they are mounted they are
available to all.
Its feasible in some operating systems to mount file systems dynamically
any *nix or Linux, Win2K, with a lot of work NT 4. For Windows 9x though
because they are DOS still you need at least a placeholder block device
present or you have to do some ugly work with the redirector to make it
look like a network connection. But then again file systems masquerading
as network protocol stacks seems a lot of work for not much benefit.
Unfortunately, if you want to produce a black box solution where nothing is
visible except the application you're going to have to get into the realm
of truly embedded systems and find or create an operating system that will
give you all that.
Its somewhat of a Holy Grail of network devices, to find an operating
system that is generalist enough to provide graphical windowing
multi-threaded services without it also coming with an awful lot of
baggage. If there was such a beast the creators would clean up, Linux+X
Windows is definitely not it.
Simon
