Re: Zones in Java

[glen e. p. ropella]

At 12:52 PM 11/24/99 -0800, you wrote:
> But even if you did that, though, there would probably be a number of
> objects in the model that never directly went through a Swarm
> interface, and so there would be no proxies, globalZone or not.

Got it.  Thanks.

> GR> Or, alternatively, is there a zone-equivalent in java?
>
> Well, you could track Java objects by subclassing all objects from a
> class that had a constructor that had the side effect of creating a
> SwarmObject that referenced the object that was being created.  In
> this way the Java objects would be referenced in the population list
> of the Zone of the SwarmObject placeholders.  That seems like a somewhat
> obsessive thing to do, to me.

Agreed.  I'm too lazy to be that obsessive.

> Of course, the Java runtime is garbage collected and does garbage
> collections on its own terms.  There is no memory management benefit
> to Zones for pure Java objects and there is no performance benefit either.
> Just more complexity.

Right.  But, I've come to use Zones for my own modeling
benefit.  I haven't settled into doing Swarm modeling with
Java, yet, though.  So, I don't know what organization will
eventually make sense to me.

> If it is migrating data from point A to point B, maybe just Java
> serialization for that (perhaps calling Swarm serialization routines
> in the Java input/output routines and then referencing those
> resources).  Also since, Zones won't migrate code, it might be worth
> looking at a Java mobile agents toolkit like Nelson Minar's Hive
> (http://hive.www.media.mit.edu/projects/hive) or IBM aglets
> (http://www.trl.ibm.co.jp/aglets).

Well, that wasn't what I was interested in for the moment.
I'm looking for a natural mechanism for building and keeping
object manifests that can be manipulated by the objects,
themselves.... for no other reason than I like to do things
that way. [grin]  After a few more javaswarm models, an opinion
of how I should do this will emerge.

Thanks.
glen

--
glen e. p. ropella =><= Feeding the hamster wheel.  Hail Eris!
Home: http://www.trail.com/~gepr                (505) 424-0448
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