When techs collide

If you've ever seen the film Ghostbusters, you'll know that each of the proton packs was, on its own, very powerful and capable of performing its function. Combine two, by crossing the streams, and rather than something twice as powerful you have a potentially Zuul-beating, potentially universe-destroying chaotic mess on your hands.

Such a combination I found today, when I mixed a little bit of Distributed Objects with a soupçon of Cocoa Bindings to create, um, Distributed Bindings (calling it Cocoa Objects would just be rude).

It's actually just as simple as you think it will be, so there's no point in any sample code. You can basically use the answer to the FAQ question on DO. Once you've got the proxy object in the client, use it as the observable controller in -bind:toObject:withKeyPath:options:. And that's it!

Well, not quite it. You'll notice that things are a wee bit crashy, which is why this is somewhat like crossing the streams. Both Bindings and DO use the Proxy pattern to achieve their magic, but because the two systems have no special knowledge of each other the proxy connections are not kept in sync. If your server object mutates after the DO connection disappears, then it tries to send a KVO notification to an object that's no longer there…boom. Having a client-server system where the client can crash the server is of, well, dubious utility. There are some things that you could do to mitigate this, for instance looking for NSConnectionDidDieNotification (in the server) or opening a heartbeat RPC for the client to "check in" with the server. These fixes will work perfectly, if the vended object is updated predictably enough that you can reliably take care of broken connections between KVO notifications. Without that you're SoL, as the server won't reliably get a DO exception - more often than not it'll segfault. But while this may be unstable, it still is damned cool.