[DUG] Advice on the TUMONZ SDK please

[Phil Middlemiss]

I need some general advice about the best way to go for building the 
TUMONZ SDK.

The SDK has a couple of objectives:
1) Provide a simple mechanism for feeding data for display in TUMONZ. 
For this I am planning on using TCP/IP.
2) Provide interaction for mouse clicks etc for apps that need it. For 
this I am planning on using ActiveX.

I am thinking, at this stage of having two Active-X controls - one that 
just wraps up the TCP/IP comms into simple methods such as AddIcon or 
AddPolygon then SendData, and the second ActiveX for handling messages 
such as when a client icon is clicked, or if a client app needs to 
swallow a mouse click for placing a new icon.

I want to keep the TCP interface rather than just use ActiveX for 
sending data because it means that the sending app can be on a remote 
machine running a different operating system.

I don't want to try and handle the mouse interactions with TCP cause 
that's just writing a whole middleware layer which is too big for our 
timeline (the synchronisation issues alone!) and I'm going to assume 
that apps that want to interact with TUMONZ are going to be running on 
the same machine. The interaction ActiveX control can start TUMONZ if it 
isn't already running. Developing ActiveX components is pretty easy in 
Delphi.

So here are my questions:

1) Is there a better way here that I've missed - I don't want to get 
into middleware layers that are complex or costly and require extra 
stuff to be installed on the client machine. I'm currently using Delphi6 
but I have BDS2006 Pro, so perhaps there's a new technology in there 
that I should be using instead?

2)  Are you still able to load and use TCP/IP for localhost comms if you 
don't have a network card installed? The GPS Manager from verison 2 is 
going to become a stand-alone app that uses the SDK to talk to TUMONZ so 
we can't really go doing that if that means people without network cards 
can't use it. If not is there a workaround?


Phil.
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