RE: [stellation-res] Project Planning

["Jonathan Gossage" <jgossage@xxxxxxxx>]

> I want to finish studying the DeltaV and WVCM specs, so that I have a
> more
> accurate idea of how difficult the different tasks are. Jim is also on
> vacation
> taking his daughter to start college, and won't be back until wednesday.
>
> But as a preliminary proposal to start some discussion:
>
> Communication protocols and session management are, I think, really
> part of the same thing. From my experience implementing protocols
> (which is, frankly, more extensive than I'd actually care to admit :-)),
> the wire-format issues of implementing a protocol are not that difficult
> for high level protocols like the HTTP family. The hard part of
> implementing
> the protocol is, basically, session management in a way that properly
> maintains the information needed by the semantic components
> that lie behind the communication protocol. The protocol support  may
> well
> be a large enough task to justify more that one person being involved.
> Anyone
> on the list who enjoys protocol implementation, feel free to come
> forward, and
> we can work out how to divide this up.

I have also had a certain amount of experience in this area and I am quite
comfortable working with communications and protocols. Actually, having
looked at the WebDAV and WVCM specifications, I don't think that session
management is going to be that tough a job, given that these are stateless
protocols with all state being stored in the resource objects. I think there
may be more work involved in the repository changes, particularly since we
will need to do incremental on disk structure upgrades as we make changes to
the on disk structures.
>
> The Eclipse client integration should really be Jim's baby.  Jim is
> primarily
> a UI guy, and most of his work has been on Eclipse integration
> components.
>
> Jonathan, you've been very active on the headless stuff, so if you'd
> like to continue
> working on that, you're welcome to.  I think that the ant stuff is also
> going
> to be very closely related to the headless Eclipse stuff, so I'd
> suggest that
> you'd probably be a good person for that.
>
I am quite happy to pick up this stuff.
> I think I'd like to do the repository changes, which will hopefully not
> be too difficult. We need to specify the new session management
> behavior in order to understand what is needed. So this ties in
> closely with the protocol and session management.
>
> So now, I'll get back to reading the specs, and when I get done, I'll
> refine the writeup above and post it to the Wiki.
>
Unless we can come to a working agreement with the Eclipse folks on the
time-frame for their client-side WVCM and WebDAV work, it is going to be
difficult to put a handle on the effort required to get the client side
stuff going since it will all be dependent on the Eclipse facilities.

Regards

Jonathan