[Pipet Users] Update

[Nicolas Chauvat]

> I thought about this for a while: How will a user know who they can
> ...
> Actually, if we have a few "big nodes" (or instances of Piper) running
> (at Bioinformatics.org for one), all that the users will have to do is
> connect to them, and, because Piper is a P2P system, users will have
> access to more than what is local to the big node.  Users will have
> access to all instances of Piper connected (all that are public
> anyway).  The effect would be nearly the same as having a central
> directory service.

This sounds good to me.

> If we're thinking of Piper-to-Piper communication as something like
> agent-to-agent communication, perhaps there is something we can share
> with Narval? 

Narval is a language+interpreter to set up personal assistants (see
http://www.logilab.org/narval/app.html for examples). We did not commit to
any agent communication language yet, and probably won't as we'd better
offer different modules that implement different languages. So I guess we
will share things :-)

It would also be interesting for both groups to look at each others' way
of defining executable resources (or whatever we could agree on calling
them). In Narval we have actions and transforms that are "executable".
They all have a prototype so that we can check at run time that they have
what they need as input and that their output is correct. Originally,
inspiration came from pre/post conditions in Eiffel. We put a lot of work
in designing this and my intuition tells me that we could probably share
things there (didn't get to install and test piper to look into the matter
further, so I have to fall back to intuition, sorry).

> But, I don't know, maybe we don't want to get into SOAP when we are
> already using CORBA.

Narval is already using SOAP to connect the interpreter and the client
GUI. We might end up using something else, as our current SOAP
implementation is depressingly slow, but using SOAP has the benefit of not
requiring an ORB.

-- 
Nicolas Chauvat

http://www.logilab.com - "Mais où est donc Ornicar ?" - LOGILAB, Paris (France)