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/ | | | | BIOINFORMATICS.ORG | | The Open Lab | | | | http://bioinformatics.org/ | +----------------------------------+