[Pipet Devel] Re: Ideas for network distributed objects

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Justin Bradford wrote:
> 
> http://www.levien.com/athshe/prelim-design.html
[...]
> So back when I was looking at these things, I
> talked to Raph about gdome and we discussed the
> possibility of a light-weight wire protocol to
> do DOM like things over the network efficiently.
> 
> The link above describes Raph's thoughts/design
> ideas on such a system.

I'd like to hear comments from Jarl, Dominic, Jean-Marc and Brad on this.

> Now, here is why I think this is extremely useful
> for Loci (or whatever we call it now ;)
> 
> Bioinformatic/computational data can be very
> large, and it would be bad to have to transfer
> big blocks of data when you just need a bit of
> it.

Right.

> Instead, imagine a simple API to a tree-like
> structure. You could quickly browse through the
> structure until you found the right nodes,
> lists, and/or blobs of data. Then you just get
> the data you want. Even substrings of binary
> blobs.

...but using DOM instead of XML.

> Also, it discusses the implementation of locking
> and transaction for these distributed objects,
> which could be also be very useful for things
> like distributed computation and simulation.

Yes.  At a lower level than what we've been considering, these things are
important.  Now that we will be working with low-level objects via Overflow,
we should look into this.

> Anyway, this Athshe describes my original vision
> for distributed communication/object interaction
> in Loci. I'm curious what people think, and if
> such a system would still be useful for Loci's
> current direction.

Currently, we have 3 different ideas about how distribution can be handled:
one for each project.  Our challenge is to bring these ideas together.

Athshe is (yet) another way to implement object distribution and, having
little experience with DOM, is perhaps a bit out of my area of expertise.  So,
I'll defer to comment.  I want to hear what Jarl, Dominic, Jean-Marc and Brad
have to say.

Justin, if you want to see Athshe or an Athshe-like system implemented in VSH,
you're more than welcome to help code it :-)  This is a GNU project afterall.

Cheers.
Jeff
-- 
                      +----------------------------------+
                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
                      |                                  |
                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
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                      |        BIOINFORMATICS.ORG        |
                      |           The Open Lab           |
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                      |    http://bioinformatics.org/    |
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