Re: [ANet-devel] New Intro Doc ***MUST READ!!!***

[Benoit N. <be...@ma...>]

At 8:46 -0500 24/01/02, Chirag Kantharia wrote:
>On Sat, Jan 19, 2002 at 07:42:30PM -0500, Benoit Nadeau wrote:
>| I'm sure that this document alone can awnser 95% of your questions about
>| ANet. Not only that, but I also need your feedback. I _really_ need your
>| feedback on this one. Just tell me your comments about it in this mailing
>| list.
>
>Good work! It couldn't be possibly made simpler!
>
>Some minor nitpicks:
>
>1. Towards the end, the document becomes a bit blurred. The stuff on
>Clusters and Transparent ANet, I didn't get the point, being discussed.
>
>  * Clusters: As per the document, a cluster is a distributed network
>    which share the same (set of) "rules". Does it mean, that a bunch of
>    web servers, say, www.geocities.com, and www.yahoo.com, both of
>    which talk HTTP, form a cluster? I *know* what is a cluster, but I
>    guess, the same meaning doesn't apply here (at least, that's what
>    the document suggests).

Ahem. I think I understand what you mean.
geocities and yahoo are not in a cluster because they're not part
of the same distributed network. They can "talk" to each other,
but it would be in the form of "client-server" (from whoever initiates
the "connection").

So, yes, my definition of "cluster" is very specific to distributed
networks and ANet. I still tried to simplify that concept with examples,
but it will remain difficult to grasp until end-users can "play"
with a working ANet daemon.

>  * Transparent ANet: Quoted from the page - "ANet is used to implement
>    a Distributed Network. But you don't have to be in the network to
>    use it." Could you elaborate on this?

A big example: the Internet.
You use the Internet. You're not part of it, because you're not
an Internet router. Your ISP is likely to be part of the Internet,
since they have routers that do data routing on the Internet.

When you use the Internet, you don't "know" that there are routers
behind, and you don't know how they work. Well, until they stop
working.

ANet networks are made as a mean of data transportation/distribution,
so it will often happen that you use a client that connects to
a node that is part of a distributed network just to "use" it,
not to be part of it.

>2. This might be entirely out of place, but by the name userIntro, I
>expected, what interface the user might get and what (s)he would be able
>to do using ANet. Is there any interface visualized for the end user?

Any client can configure the ANet daemon (I wrote that somewhere in the
low-level design). So, basically, the daemon is, well, a daemon, like
Apache, but we can make a "user-friendly" client made only to monitor
and configure the daemon. And you can always change the XML config
file.

Some clients might be smarter and "auto-configure" the daemon the first
time it is launched, allowing some developers to make "plug-and-play"
services.

So... the user interface and the screenshots might be the last
thing we can do in the Anet project, a couple of years (!) from
now...

- Benad