Re: [Groupkit-users] Couple of Questions, comments

[Mark R. <ma...@ma...>]

Hey Colin,

Thanks for poking around at GroupKit.

> 1) rpc - it's doing what comm does, is there a compelling reason for
> using rpc over comm, or comm over rpc?  Might be nice to expose the
> underlying socket, to the extent that it'd then be possible to push
> handlers over the top (get compression, encryption, etc.)

Yeah, they're more or less the same... both evolved around the same 
time.
We felt no reason to switch off what we had since it worked, and 
minimized
dependencies on other things.  It'd be nice to add things like 
encryption
over this, I know its something Chad has talked about.

> 2) environment - distributed tree.  Very cool.  Can one insert procs
> into an environment, as elements?  This would be nice because then one
> could map other data structures under it (e.g. arrays.)

What do you mean by 'insert procs' into it?
I guess trivially an environment can be used as an array, just never
store anything more than one level deep. ;-)

> 3) distribution - I have no idea how you're doing peer distibution.

In the default architecture, everyone maintains connections to everyone
else, so distributing things around is as straightforward as getting 
someone
to send you a copy of something.

> 4) firewalls - each node in a group needs a public IP address - perhaps
> there needs to be some kind of proxy server?

With the way things are set up by default, everyone makes connections
to everyone else, so its completely unworkable going against any 
firewall.
We kept things so that the programming model doesn't depend heavily
on the underlying network architecture though, and the system actually
has a meta-architecture that makes it possible to muck around with that
kind of thing.  One thing I'll be playing with is making it easier to 
bring out
a completely centralized architecture, which would help addressing
some firewall issues (but that step would give only the most minimal
firewall penetration of course).

> 5) obj - might be nice to map to arrays - this would make the thing
> completely transparent.

Should be possible to do on top of what's already there.

BTW, there's a semi-public Wiki available that we're using for GK 
related
development notes, etc. at http://groupkit.roseman.org

Mark