[Pipet Devel] Piper design issue

[Jarl van Katwijk]

Hi Pipers,

The BL sources are nearing a status where they can be commited to the
Piper cvs tree. This is great for me because it clears up much about
what Piper will be capable of. Once you read the code you'll understand
too ;)

Nah, ok, not a lot of you will read them I guess, and most of it you
already knew I guess. And some day I'll add it to the PiperDesign.html
anyway.

But there's one issue that's big enough to discuss, the transparency of
the BL for passing DL -> PL communications. For the BL's sake in theory
there's no limitation of what can be passed on, I see none for the PL
because a NEW pl will be used, in paralel if needed. The problem is with
the UI and DL which are not capable of handling new and threaded remote
input.

When a DL has commited a network that is to be executed on multiple
machines, it will receive PUSHED responses. Like on a plain text
terminal it's possible to put text by applications. I would like to add
a 'virtual tty' or 'graphical output area' to the UI and DL designs.
When it's possible for nodes\networks to push their output to the UI
Piper will be a much more powerfull system. 

I'm thinking of adding a Corba server orb to the DL that handles stuff
like:
- create_virtual_tty();
- display(tty,text); 
- display related api subset..
  ....
- close_virtual_tty();
etc.

What do you think about this? And what about the amound of work it will
take to implement?

jarl