> >I am arguing that a robust message capability is very difficult to
> >design......
>
> This explains why the InterBase events have been such a chore to deal

with.

> Just about every version of InterBase has been as flaky as can be with

them.

> What a mess they have been... (from 4.x and onward)
>
> Events as currently implemented are nearly useless. I think it's time for
> some fresh new ideas on the whole matter... Let's keep this thread rolling
> and not squelch budding ideas.

I don't normally step into these tech issues, but I couldn't resist it. On
all platforms except Windows and Novell, I have successfully used events
(both asynch and synch) in the manner that they were designed, with minimal
problems. However -

On windows, the issues were pretty much as follows...

1. the IBEventAlerter component that originally shipped with Delphi 1.0 was
badly designed and implemented, nobody internally really ever got around to
fixing this, and it was more a suck it and see approach.
2. There is however a new 3rd Party Event Alerter component
SuperIBEventAlerter, that seems to do the trick, ie. it seems to work well.
3. The initial Microsoft TCPIP stack didn't support out of band messaging -
something if I remember rightly was pretty much a must for Events, and out
of band messaging was pretty much a TCPIP standard, this particular lack of
support from Microsoft was not exactly widely publicised, and caused many
users to stop using events, mainly because of the problems this introduced.
4. The Replication software for 6.0 now uses events fairly extensively, and
in tests seems to be holding up to the job pretty well, equally I know of a
number of customers who are now using events in their applications
successfully without the problems of old....

There is nothing wrong with the concept and implementation of events as they
stand, they can be improved, by adding more sophisticated functionality, for
example wouldn't it be nice if an application was informed of database
events e.g. a log on for example. Couldn't we have events that weren't fixed
strings - defined variables ?, or a fixed string + a variable ?

I am sure a few other people will add their comments, but this is as I
remember it...

Regards
Paul