I think you could do what you are asking Chris, with a minor modification. You would need to have the user perform a prior install of a script to enable to communication with the web service, but then once it was installed, that is all they would need. From then on, all scripts could be downloaded, and managed at run time from the database. In that you could store the scripts as either simple strings, and pass them to the ruby engine at run time to be executed, or maybe you could even store them as blobs in the DB and then execute them as a full script. I am not sure about the blob idea, in theory it could work, but in practice there might be hiccups along the way....but the managing them as simple strings that get passed around should work.

As I go through this exercise over the next few weeks / months, I will keep you posted. If anyone out there wants to play a little and be a part of this, by all means, let me know... there is more than enough work to go around Obviously my catalog specific stuff I wouldn't be open to sharing, but anything generic like methods supporting gears, and or dynamic script loading from the db would be awesome to give back.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for all your support, it is greatly appreciated!

I agree I will simply have the users install gears themselves. It is much easier this way.

As for what i am trying to do, or at least at this point, what I am thinking about doing is:

I have a small catalog of products that are used by designers when they sit down to design outdoor spaces. Rather then send a CD of these models around to the designers (as I have in the past), I would prefer instead to us the web dialog functionality of SU to allow them to log into a webservice where I could use gears to download local copies of the product SU models. Then when the user wishes to use the product, they could browse my catalog through a web dialog (locally cached with gears, allowing both performance gains, and more importantly offline access) and select the product to use. Then I will simply access the gears database and load the component.

The main question / concern I have left is can I download a SU component and simply load it with the Ruby API, or do I need to download the definition of the component and create it in real time with the Ruby API? I am hoping the first opton is possible, but I really need to dive into the Ruby API as I am a complete newbie to it!

V.

Hey Remus,

Don't feel too bad about not having all the answers, the fact is, you have answered 50% of all the questions I have ever asked here.

As far as the the other question goes, I guess I will just have to try it for myself and see... then I will post the results here so that collectively we all know.

thx

V.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the quick reply. I have been a lurker here for a long time, and now that I officially have a post...and a reply, I finally feel like one of the family.

I am doing a great deal of reading about the Gears API, as it is new to me as well, but my question here was intended to be more specific to the SketchUp product, rather than the functionality of Gears. In that, as I currently understand it, SketchUp uses IE to render the web dialogs that it displays, and since naively IE doesn't support Gears, I was wondering how I would go about enabling Gears in this instance.

So I guess this is really a 2 part question

1. Does SketchUp use the installed version of IE on the box, or does SketchUp actually ship a version of IE with it's windows product, and if so, what is the version? (note I am talking about windows only here)

2. Can I use a web dialog inside SketchUp to install gears on a person's PC if they don't have it, and if they already have it installed in their regular IE, will I be able to leverage it in SketchUp? In other words does SketchUp limit IE at all when it is run for web dialogs?

Thanks, and sorry if my first post was a little vague.

V.

Hi All,

I have been looking for some information on the ability to leverage Google Gears with the Web Dialog functionality of SketchUp to provide cached / local design content from a web service, and can't find any details on it's usage, so I wondered if anyone here has tried this, or knows any details about the feasibility of using this approach.

Any help / thoughts are appreciated, as I want to be sure I am not heading down a path that ends with a cliff

Thx

V.