xTable development state...

For the past few months (in addition to my day job) I've been working diligently on another of my projects, my 9yr old's programming language, Dustyscript... (also hosted on sourceforge, project name:dustyscript) ..

I have allowed development work on cxtable to lapse in the interim, as I am really the only contributing developer to the project...

I still have the groundwork laid down for the 4-player over-the-peer-network 'TournoChess' game that I promised some 1-3 news's ago..

I also have some major infrastructure work that needs to be done, and I am still trying to figure out how to do it... it involves dial-up providers firewalling out "server socket" connections, an essential to the true serverless nature of the peer-to-peer work that I am doing here...

There is a workaround still to be tested fully, that uses the proposed 'server end' to create a second client that 'switches' to server once the connection is completed... this is referred to as peer-enable, and should work.... But in a scenario where EVERYONE has a dial-up provider that blocks off ServerSocket, I would like still another option (perhaps there is some tunneling, or some port that they do allow it on, etc... I still need to contact some of these abominations of ISP's and see what's up).

Also.. there is some fairly decent overhaul work on the "plugin" interfaces that will be needed.... As I see it... the next stage of the project will require the following types of 'p2p' plugins.

1- A true one-on-one, initiated by one side.
*this needs to be modified from its current state so that the receiver of the request has a chance to deny it prior to it just happening. As it goes now, the requestor determines who they wish to use the plugin with, and then it all happens.

2- A round-robin peer plugin
*this will need to be created... this would implement a virtual token ring and pass all of the information to everyone, through a chain, in a multi-user scenario.

3- A propped-up-pseudo-server plugin
*this would allow a plugin to function with a server process that dictates which 'peer' is acting as server... for certain 'games' or plugins, this might even be best...although it is not the truly 'decentralized' solution...

In addition to a new and revised Plugins API, the documentation for the entire program needs to move to HTML format (platform independence, my friends) from the .doc format abomination it currently resides in...

Truly, though, anyone who has been downloading cxtable has not contacted me...and I assume either that it wasn't to their tastes, or developed enough yet, or it all went off just dandily....

Anyone who needs help figuring out what the heck I did, how to prop up a virtual 'intranet' with your friends using xTable, or what types of dreams I had envisioned for xTable almost a year ago (if not already a year ago!).... they can contact me:

xiarcel@prodigy.net
xiarcel@yahoo.com
xiarcel@users.sourceforge.net
xiarcel@global-symbiosis.net

I am interested in hearing any criticisms, complaints, questions....etc...

By no means is the stuff I did "user friendly'" to set up, as the people I've been doing alpha-testing with (mostly my friends) have told me... But the stuff I have done is definitely valuable, if even in the infancy of a much larger future project...

~Dave