Re: Draft: My one-on-one technical session with Doug

From: Eric Armstrong (eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com)
Date: Mon Oct 16 2000 - 18:04:15 PDT


Great summary of the issues I've been concerned about,
Eugene.

I'm happy to say that I have at last constructed some
real, genuine source code that can form the basis for
a distributed, versioned, categorized, link-typable,
linked, node-graph repository. I've been developing
the design document side by side with the code, so the
architecture might even make sense by the time I'm done.

Look for an announcement very, very soon now.
(This week, I hope.)

The code will have a lot of bones showing (large sections
are still skeletal). And I'm sure there are some well-
understood patterns I'm missing that could be applied to
improve the solutions.

In outline, though, I'm delighted with the design. One
major nut to crack was how versioing works in a node
graph. The solution to that came on the way to figuring
out a solution the "competing versions" problem, which
plagued me most of the weekend. It is pure heaven to
think that a foundation might actually now exist that
can be used to develop the functionality.

Having defined a core architecture capable of supporting
distributed, peer-to-peer operation, I'm a lot less
concerned if the initial implementations use a simple
client and put most of the burden on the server. I'm
pretty sure that if that capability isn't built in at
the outset, it will be harder than hell to retrofit
later.

Ensuring the basic functionality opens the door
to a whole world of implementations -- one of which
*should* be a browser-based interface, both for making
it easy for others to take a look at it, and for
convenience in accessing the system from some unclean
system that is not enlightened enough to act as a
peer-to-peer server.



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Tue Aug 21 2001 - 17:57:56 PDT