Re: Distributed system portability

[Darren New <dnew@san.rr.com>]

Thanks to *everyone* for the comments. I have much food for thought. :-)

Actually, my plan is as follows:

At each peer, I postulate a single persistant data store holding a
rather complex set of data (primarily file attributes and routing
information, etc.) I also have a client process to talk to each peer and
to its own file store, exchanging data with other file stores.

I have the portable spec for the communication messages, but I was
hoping to defer having to deal with that for a while, in favor of
ensuring that the algorithms will work as I think they will. If I can
make the peer-to-peer stuff look like message passing or calls to
protected objects, then I can layer the procedures that do the
formatting into XML/MIME/BEEP/etc on top once I know it's worthwhile.

Of course, this means I also get to release it earlier, with the
understanding it only interoperates with certain versions of itself to
start.

>  You're
> going to have to do a lot of work to guarantee representation of every
> record type you want to send/receive.

Yeah. In reality, I've already defined the format in MIME and XML. I was
just hoping I wouldn't need to implement the translation from Ada
message sends into text libraries and such until after the rest of the
system started humming.

-- 
Darren New / Senior MTS & Free Radical / Invisible Worlds Inc.
San Diego, CA, USA (PST). Cryptokeys on demand. dnew@san.rr.com
          Only a WIMP puts wallpaper on his desktop.