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Time for a make-over
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Loading ...Lets start of with the obvious. I don’t mean a personal make-over, but one of my main website. If been struggling with getting it to work in both Firefox (and mozilla related browsers) as well as in Internet Explorer. Why, you may wonder. Well it is pretty easy. Apparently browsers can’t agree to agree on how to implement CSS. More specifically they can’t agree on what not to implement.
Before you all get lost and don’t know what the heck I am talking about lets explain with an example of a few years back. Lets say that you wanted to slowly blend something in using CSS and a little bit of JavaScript after someone hits a button. No problem you might think. WRONG!
For some reason the browsers could not agree on one method to do this. So each one had its own implementation. Don’t get me wrong they were sort of the same, yet not completely. Which means that if I implement it for IE (Internet Explorer) it wouldn’t work as I wanted it to in Firefox. No thank god they fixed this alpha blending. But there are many more things that aren’t fixed. Like were to start calculating with offsets (that’s the number of pixels from the border to the parent border).
Since I have become somewhat dedicated in working with CSS, and I’m somewhat of a geek when it comes to complying to the standards as much as possible, all these problems and incompatibilities make my live hell. So the decision made was simple: ‘Completely redesign the website’.
Luckily for me I’ve also been experimenting with using Typo3 to replace my own coded piece of junk (god I wish I had some more time to code something decent). So I guess I can do both at the same time and hopefully get them done at the same time. I hope to publish some more information on usage of Typo3 as well as some images and process reports for the designing to keep you all up-to-date.
The .Net Remoting compared to other techniques
.NET Remoting is an enabler for application communication. It is a generic system for different applications to use to communicate with one another. .NET objects are exposed to remote processes, thus allowing interprocess communication. The applications can be located on the same computer, different computers on the same network, or even computers across separate networks .
Remoting consists out of the following ellements that are needed:
- One or multiple channels to serve objects on
- Objects that implement or inherit from the MarshalByRefObject class
- Marking objects as Serializable
- A class that manages the networking, though not needed it sure helps reduce complexity
Similar methods
.Net Remoting is not the only method that supports interprocess communication and not the most respected one either. Yet when you are using .Net it is good to take a look at it as it has some major advantages compared to other somewhat older methods. To demonstrate that we will compare a few older methods against .Net Remoting.
Distributed COM ojects
Most older applications use distributed COM, also known as DCOM, to communicate between processes. Though DCOM is stable and the performance is acceptable it uses protocol which make communications across networks (Internet) almost impossible. This is due to the fact that DCOM uses a proprietary binary protocol which not all object models support. This hinders the networking of cross platform applications. A second major draw back is the fact that DCOM requires you to open several ports in a firewall, which will decrease the firewalls effectiveness and increase the danger of connecting to the Internet.
.NET Remoting eliminates the difficulties of DCOM by supporting different transport protocol formats and communication protocols. This allows .NET Remoting to be adaptable to the network environment in which it is being used.
Web services
Another good implementation of inter process communication is Web Services, and even though it looks very similar to .Net Remoting there are a few important differences. So why does it look so similar, well .Net Remoting includes Web Services as a possible method for communications. Web Services allow you to exchange messages between applications in a way that is platform, object model and programming language independent.
All communications between the applications occur with the Simple Object Access Protocol(SOAP). Important differences between .Net Remoting and Web Services are:
- Web Services require you to use the HTTP protocols, Remoting allows you to use any protocol
- Web Services work in a stateless model where each call creates a new object for the return. Remoting can create one object per process to handle all the calls.
- Remoting does not require the entire object to be expressed in XML for transferring it across the network. Web Services requires this due to limitations in the SOAP protocol.
.Net remoting
So how does .Net Remoting do what the other implementations appear to be unable to do, well it has to do with how Microsoft choose to set the communication up. First of you will never directly get involved in the proxy or how this works, they opted for a Transparent Proxy so we don’t have to worry about it. Our remoted object is in fact a Transparent Proxy that pretends to be whatever Marshalled object we wish it to be (it does have to match the object on the server however!). This Transparent Proxy then connects to an actual proxy for communicating with the appropriate sink.
Note: that there can be various sinks that are passed before ever ariving in a channel, and even then it is possible to bundle channel sinks. For the example and the image on the right I’ve kept it relativly simple.
Long time…
It’s been a while since my last post, which means it’s about time to write something again. Why haven’t I posted in the past week or so. Well two reasons. First reason I finished my internship, which meant writing a shit load of documents and getting these neatly printed and binding them. This is something I’d like to avoid having to do again!.
The second reason, somewhat related to the first, is finally starting my new job. Which meant spending tons of time on getting everything ready. So what does this mean, well first of you’ll start noticing less search engine related posts. I no longer research it nor do I intend to keep up my research (unless my company asks me to do so!).
In the near future I’m hoping to start posting those articles that I promised earlier this year. Next to that you’ll be reading a bit more about databases and webdevelopment.
