[Pipet Devel] Re: Overflow/Loci/GMS collaboration

[Brad Chapman]

> jarl van katwijk wrote:
> > Good attitude, and C isn't hard. I've commented the gms code heavily, but
> > feel free to ask, it's gonna be hard to get the global picture I guess.

It took me a while to get the hang of Loci's big picture, so I expect I'll
have similar issues with GMS (and Overflow) but it'll come eventually! I'm
really excited to try a lot of the things your propose, especially the
neural net/genetic algorithm idea for generating a best overall flow path
though a diagram. Very cool.

J.W. Bizzaro wrote:
> Brad, providing we all agree that the core will be based on GMS and coded in
> C, you will want to give GMS much of the functionality we designed for Loci:
> 
>   * XML command stream between GUI (front) and core (middle) ??? (unless we
> use CORBA)
>   * Network (workflow diagram) script construction (in XML database?)
>   * Network script manipulation
>   * Directory services (like DNS - know what is where)
>   * Request/comply and send/receive communication between cores

What I'd like to think about doing is keeping the small middle that we
already have in python, and then building the core off of this using
CORBA. Some of the reasons I would like to try this are:

1. Reuse of code: I'm not too pumped to be reprogramming the same stuff in
C (Python to C converters excluded).

2. Ease of building fronts: While the GMS core has a better suited design
for implementing data connectivity etc, it's CORBA idl is huge, and would
(IMHO) discourage people from developing fronts because they would need to
implement a large interface. This may also be a problem if we need to
adjust the middle, as the prospect of breaking a whole bunch of fronts is
really messy. While I think it will be a challenge to map the "simple"
streaming XML dialog communication between the front to the middle that we
currently have to GMS's messaging object based core, I hope it might be
possible. In addition, if we are going to be using XML, python has *a lot*
of great tools for working with it, and so we might be able to use tools
from both python and C for the core. How does this sound? Possible? Am I
smoking crack?

Brad