We've been chewing on some of these questions reguarding the current version of the framework, and the one to come out shortly. I'm hoping for some insight and into any of these questions.

#1. The next version of Mere Mortals is suposed to support easy 3 tier application development. We are trying to nail down our communications method between the layers and how the framework might do that. Our surmise at this point goes like this...

Layer 1: GUI with views from Buisnes objects mostly used as an interface to layer two. Uses ? technology to send information to layer two.

Layer 2: Buisness objects with local/remote views linked to back end tables? The objects contain most buisness rules. They are stateless?

Layer 3: Database in whatever format accesed by layer 2 via ? technology. Using the local/remote view technique?

#2. We've had discussions reguarding the middle tier buisness objects and how they use data amongst them. I'm aware of the apartment thing where in seperate apartments they can't share data environments but in the same apartment they can. In what situations are the different methods better.

#3. In the framework, if you want to open a view more than once and point to different reccords. Say for instance two buisness objects are working on the same table but different fields in the same session. How whould you handle it. The data enironment classes don't allow for aliases, or do they?

#4. How does the 3 tier modle in the framework pass and handle messages like new, save, etc. between the layers? Does the front end need to re-instantiate the middle tier each time a message needs to go through, or does it just depend on the situation? Is this sort of thing part of the framework model per say or is some of it left up to the developers?