Re: flexfax: Design for a portable Java hylafax clients: i want your opinions, please!

[Joe Phillips <jaiger@net-foundry.com>]

On Fri, May 05, 2000 at 04:36:37PM +0200, Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:
> Dmitry Bely wrote:
> 
> whats about an option for HylaFAX to specify a sort order independend
> from the JobFmt paramters and Protocol. Something like a SortFmt which 
> uses nearly the same syntax like JobFmt but specifys the sort order
> of the queues ?
> 
> This should help all clients.

I vote against this.  I see job sorting as the client's responsibility.  The
client is a view of the data on the server.  Why complicate the server just
for sorting?  Adding a SortFmt command to the protocol could also increase
network overhead (for IMHO useless features.)  Every time the user decides
they want to sort by some other field, the SortFmt string is sent and then
the joblist is queried (again) from the server.  The same data could be
transmitted many times over.  Without a SortFmt, the data is sent once
and the client can sort and re-sort at will without utilizing the network.

-joe