[Plastic-devs] Some ideas

[Pierre F. <fer...@si...>]

Dear Plastic developers,

I'm playing with the last Plastic developements/implementations and I 
must say that I am really positively surprise by the result.

Just one point about the Plastic Hub. I wonder if it is not too 
difficult for a user to understand : if and why he has to launch a Hub ? 
which one ? if and why he has to register each collaborative 
applications ? If and how he can stop the current plastic Hub ?

I) One solution could be :
--------------------------
A) When a Plastic compatible application starts:
    1) If it has an inside plastic hub capability, it launchs it, but 
only if there is not another Hub already runnning
    2) Systematically it registers itself
B) When this application stops:
    if it is the last registered application, it tries to stop the hub 
if it can.

The B) point means that it could be interesting to have a PLASTIC 
message asking to the PLASTIC hub to stop itself.
Or we can imagine that the PLASTIC HUB should stop itself when the last 
client unregisters.

We can also imagine that a plastic hub implementation should remove a 
registered client if it can not contact it (crash...).

II) Another solution could be:
------------------------------
A) When a Plastic compatible application starts, it does a 
pre-registration. I mean, it writes somewhere (.plastic dir)
that it is running and what is its plastic address (?)
B) When a Plastic Hub starts, it will register automatically all 
"pre-registered" applications.
C) Whend a Plastic compatible application wants to publish data
    1) If there is no running plastic hub, it tries to launch one if it can
    2) it publishs its data

For the stop phase, we can follow the same rules that in I) proposition


The second proposition is certainly the better (the hub is running only 
if it is required). But it could imply a complex plastic address 
negociation between a "pre-registered" application and a new running hub.

Some comments ?


Regards
Pierre