[Vrs-development] on a freestanding LDS

[Bill Lance]

This is a final report to the list about the weekend
IRC meeting.

Overall, it was a very useful and productive chatfest.
I got a chance to talk with some new folks and to
finally talk in detail with some of the other project
people.

One very important thing in my mind has come out of it
that I would like to present to this list.

We really need to be much clearer about what the VRS
does. Not how it does it, but what it does.

This issue come from talking with people about VRS
during the meeting and seeing what needed the most
explaination.  But it also come from something that
has been nagging me from the begining.  And by
begining, I mean before VRS was formulated.

When I first got interested in dotgnu I started
researching what it was all about.  That search
covered a lot, since the issues are so abiguous ..
from Passport to middleware to virtual machines.  But
the thing about dependency on remote servers bothered
me.  Not on remote resoures, on remote servers.  It
kept occuring to me that "We can do that on our own
machines".  All the hysteria about 'accessing data
from remote devices!!!!' left me wondering what the
noise was about.  I have been doing that for a long
time, with an Apache server running quietly on my
firewall.  I can and do put files on that, can go
anywhere in the world, and get to them.

Everything the .NET does, in all it's manifisations,
that is of value to users, can be done from our own
personal part of the Internet, our own workstations. 
A broader statement is that all so called
'Webservices' can also be deliverd by our personal PC
connections. That says that it CAN be done.  There may
be good reasons NOT to, however.

One reason is that a particular site may have truely
unique and worthwhile value, say like Mapquest. 
Another reason is a matter of net resources.  What we
want to do might need more bandwidth and presence than
our PC's can provide. That's exactly why most people
with WWW Websites farm out the hosting to a commercial
provider.

The question boils down to what do we want to do.

Everyone on the net has a two faced relationship with
it. We can be both users and providers.  Most
certainly, most individuals are usually thought to be
completely users. But more and more, they are also
providers of at least personal information.  And the
direction pointed in by .NET and Passport, and b2c
systems in general, suggests that that level of
providing persoanl information will increase.  And
that it will be less and less a matter of filling that
information into a web form and more and more of it
being plucked by an rpc of some type from some
server.

Once again, that server can be our own computer.

VRS was conceived in responce to the problem that most
people do not have the net resources of bandwitdh,
presence and the usable software to do this.  The
Services Manager is envisioned as the 'usable
software' server. It is intended that it will support
http, ftp, smp, SOAP, java, J2EE, XML-RPC and what
ever else in the way of alphabet soup shows up, THAT
IS NOT ENCUMBERED with IP. The rest of the VRS system
addresses the rest of the resource issue, bandwidth
and presence, that is needed the users single machine
is not enough.

Well, I keep forgetting that in many cases, the one
machine IS enough.  If a person is using netservices
for id, authentication or purschase transactions, they
certainly should be restricted to when they are
actually on line and initiating the transaction.  So
presence may not be an issue in this kind of use,
either.

To date, we have been looking at an LDS only as
running
within the context of a Cluster.  It's only
independent
actions are to subscribe to a Cluster and to login to
a
running Custer.

It also could operate alone.  If the users services
and
data is Registered in the local LDS, everything is
there to respond to a request for those services while
the user is on line.  This may be quiet sufficient for
many users, most of the time.  But when greater
bandwitdh, or full time presence is needed, then the
user can subscribe to a Cluster, and gain those
resources.  Or, they can organize a new Cluster if a
convient one is not available.

How does this grab ya'll?




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