[Pipet Devel] NETPIPES

[Brad Chapman]

> 
Jeff wrote:
[...snip...stuff about Netpipes...]

Okay, after starting at the documentation for a long time (man, this 
thing has a lot of switches!), it seems like Netpipes makes a 
client/server process that runs through TCP/IP, right? Mostly, it just 
seems to make it so that you can deal with sockets at a higher level 
and make simple client/servers. Like in this example:

server$ faucet 3000 --out tar cf - .
client$ hose server 3000 --in tar xvf -

You just set up a simple server that untars everything that comes in 
(it listens on port 3000) and then a client tars up a directory and 
sends it to the server on port 3000. The server untars it and voila, 
you have a transferred directory.

At least from the python end this type of stuff is already covered in 
the standard library--the uil to dl layer works through these type 
of convenience classes. You also can deal with things using a nice 
scripting language and not shell scripts (bleah!).

>> It seems to me that we will need to
>> re-invent much of this in the BL.

Can you explain exactly how you see netpipes being used? I think I 
understand what it does, I just don't see your vision for how to use 
it. 
    Also have you checked out the dl_info.html doc in the loci module? 
I have a diagram in that of how Jarl and I were last talking about 
handling remote communication. At least, this is what we ended up 
settling on last I heard :-). If stuff works like this then the dl 
shouldn't need to worry about setting up TCP/IP connections, right? Or 
do you disagree with this model?

> At least in CORBA -- Netpipes uses sockets.

Didn't we decide that sockets = bad and corba = good? :-)

> Perhaps the author of Netpipes would like to collaborate with us.  
There are
> many similarities.  Just my US$0.02.

I don't know Jeff, the page you sent us was dated 1997, and I 
downloaded the "latest" code and it doesn't look like it's been 
touched since 98. Netpipes is looking pretty fast asleep...

Brad