Re: [Fresco-devel] network transparency

On Thu, Jul 17, 2003 at 08:39:54PM +0200, cinap_lenrek wrote:
> hi
> 
> imho... fresco is not very network-transparent yet. for example... images have
> to be stored on the servers side... i think to write a client-lib that
> for exaple loads the image-file... and transfair it to the server with corba
> is not a good idea... because you then have to write wrapper-libs for other
> programing-languages... and you will lose the "all-you-need-is-an-orb"-feature.
> 
> what is planed to solve this problem?

There is no problem, I think.  Images don't _have_ to be stored on the
server side, but it makes things faster if you do so, and so we
recommend it.  It's fairly easy to get an image into the server; just
call RasterKit::create_empty_raster, then call Raster::load_data on
the returned Raster object, passing in PNG data as an array of bytes.

The API could use some work; create_empty_raster requires that the
caller have parsed the PNG header, and the whole system assumes that
you get your data into PNG format.  But this is just tweaking; it
wouldn't be all that hard to create a
RasterKit::create_raster_from_data method, that could guess at the
image file format or something.

> my idea is to provide something like a localServer, that provides corba-objects
> to handle this kind of problems. (transfairing big blocks of data to the server)
> maybe providing routines for bypassing corba as the transfair-channel.
> (using a network-filesystem or ssh...)

I don't see why this would be done outside the server.  It's already
easy to transfer big blocks of data in CORBA; just make a
sequence<octet> (which is basically the CORBA version of unsigned
char[]), and pass it in a call.  We've talked about bypassing CORBA in
various ways in the past, but it doesn't seem to be worth it; the
sequence<octet> passing code in most ORBs is highly optimized, and
setting up those external transfer methods would be a huge pain.

> you can also use it like an xdm... or providing interfaces to the application
> to store local configuration data...

I think these are separate problems, though interesting ones.  I think
there is discussion of configuration stuff on the Wiki?

> [...]
> i'll be happy for a response... i realy want to better understand fresco
> 
> sorry for my bad english... -_-

No problem; most of us developers aren't native speakers either :-).
(I am, but I'm in the minority...)

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to
see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. -- Stephen Jay Gould