Hello all! I've been doing a lot of thinking about the design of Loci/VSh/Piper, and especially about the ideas Jeff has had about combining the middle (dl) and front (ui) back together. In thinking about this, I was trying to kind of find some good models to look at the might have also tried the approach of having the user interface separated from the main functionality of the program through a communication layer. In our case, we are currently using a streaming XML dialog to separate these two layers. In my opinion, this approach is really cool because it provides us the ability to have multiple user interfaces in any language imaginable. So anyways, in my searching I started taking a look at the Berlin project (http://www.berlin-consortium.org) and think its kind of interesting that they use a similar separation of processing from user interface. If you check out http://www2.berlin-consortium.org/wiki/html/Berlin/HowBerlinUsesCORBA.htm, they have a terse description of this separation. Although they use CORBA (and not sockets like we have) the basic design seems to be the same--looking at it from our perspective the front (ui) makes calls to the middle (dl) to modify an xml description of the user interface, and then return info back upon completion of the modification. I just thought this might be good food for discussion, as it is kind of cool to me to see a really similar model... Also, if anyone is interested, there is a redesigned dl (middle) in cvs along with documentation (yay!) on the new structure of the code and on the overall design plan for the dl in general. Comments are more than welcome :-) The immediate plan for the middle (dl) is connection with gms (the bl) so we'll see how that goes... Thanks for listening. Brad