RE: [Cxtable-devel] RE:Cygwin...etc..[continued]

[Williams, D. <DAV...@ca...>]

Woops..hit "Send" too early on that one...

I am at an interesting state in this development...  I have a bunch of little and big unfinished cxtable projects...  And I can't decide which to do..

Naturally...the CVSing of the code has to be complete...and the associated packaging issues...  But after that, I am not sure where I had wanted to go...(FIRST, most important outstanding cxtable project)

The only "plugins" that I currently have thought of are game related... and that is not the only exclusive capability of such a network....  However... I am needing to come to grips with non-global multi-"user" plugins..(A SECOND, importance arguable either way, outstanding cxtable project).

That is, a plugin that does not exist for every person from the get-go (non-global) yet would involve more than a simple peer-to-peer (such as Chess).

As far as that is concerned, two plugins come to mind.  A Poker game, and a new game called xTournoChess, which is a 16 X 16 board with 4 Chess players instead of two, one on each side of the board...

The idea, then, is implementing the plugin so that either one of two things happens.. -1- There is a plugin-server process running on a machine that mediates between the various clients involved, and runs the plugin.. Thereby requiring a new connection to that server-process from each of the peers involved....OR -2- The initiator of the plugin runs the plugin-manager piece, and all of the communication occurs through the initial p2p connections....

Does the above make sense?  I first thought of -1-, but gravitate heavily now toward -2-...  Because, given a set of people (called A,B,C,D,E)...  There are two connections between each, and these are readily able to accept messages... tagging the message as "<PLUG><plugname-manager>" instead of "<PLUG><plugname>" would allow the manager piece access to the instructions, which it could then propogate to the involved parties...

This would allow the plugin "logic" to be executed once, and the appropriate moves/instructions to be propogated to the 'screens' or other implementation of the plugin elsewhere...


That is one among many of the cxtable projects outstanding... yes...it is game-related as far as implementation, but it would allow the infrastructure to be built for multiple-peer plugins that would extend beyond the "tournochess"...

Other cxtable projects (a THIRD, and equally arguable either way as far as importance is concerned, outstanding cxtable project) are the potential DTD-ing of the messaging, so that a robust parser can be used to process the XML that is passing between the peers/etc...  This is also a potentially important project...although cosmetically from the outside it would not reflect much difference (ideally ;-) ) it would greatly impact certain scalability issues in the future...

Another piece (a FOURTH) is a file-sharing (plugin?) piece... This could be run as a "download-server" on each peer, at a dynamically assigned port...  The ftp-client could be configured to read to that port, create a data sock, and download... I have a piece of software (currently being used by the Registry Server to publish itself) called Linlyn that I already modified as xDownloadLinlyn, with an interface xDownloadListener...  Multi-file downloads would create an instance of xDownloadLinlyn, which would call the xDownloadListener's method to notify it (filename,contents)... Either way...the concept of file-sharing to be plugged in is another work...

Yet another (FIFTH, and potentially of second importance only to CVS, depending on who you are) is the Swing conversion.  'nuff said.

Still another (SIXTH, and also potentally of second importance only to CVS, depending on who you are) is the refining of the GUI (swing or not) and the user processes so that they are more friendly, and more automated... 

Still yet another (SEVENTH, and also potentially of equal importance to CVS, swing and GUI-refine) is the setting up for behind configurable proxies/firewalls.  


I hope I neither scare you off from the huge set of projects I embark upon, nor scare you off from the still potentially limited list I myself can come up with...

When I advertised for help, I didn't know what to expect... I had dreams for this project...and some of them have come to fruition...and I have learned a great deal as a result of simply working on the project...  You seem to wish for your role to be that of mentor, and that is perfectly acceptable to me.... ANY level of involvement is great... Code, help organize, dream, spark new ideas...whatever...  The reason (mentioned in the help-wanted ad but re-iterated here for clarity) I wanted another developer is more for vision and less for individual lines of code...  You certainly have exceeded all of my expectations as far as a team member is concerned...

One thing I might or might not have already demonstrated is my ability to ramble...

If I hadn't prior to this email, I'm sure I did with this verbose email..

Maybe I could ask you a semi-frank question...  What is that you saw in the project that made you want to work on it..?  ((There are no bad answers ;-))

Do you have any thoughts on the above projects?  Do you have any more to add that you think might be of more importance.. (All opinions weigh heavily here)

Thanks,
Dave

David Scott Williams
Computer Associates
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