Re: [Vrs-development] thoughts

[Tim Terlegård]

> I've never entirely understood the reasoning behind
> Agents roaming around, executing on various machines.

What if I want some statistics of the performance of a remote server. I 
program my little Mobile Agent, I send it on the network. The Mobile Agent 
will go to the remote servier, be executed and stay on the remote server for 
a couple of hours. Every minute it collects an SNMP variable from the server 
and stores the value as a part of its state. When 8 hours slipped by, the 
Mobile Agent walks back to where it came from and tells the administrator 
about the server performance during the day. The alternative is for the 
administrator to poll the SNMP variable every minute and save the values in a 
history. This increases both the need of computer power and the load on the 
network. This is one neat feature of Mobile Agents.

Mobile Agents - http://www.infosys.tuwien.ac.at/Research/Agents/intro.html


> In many ways, our thinking about a DataSet points to
> some of this, I think.  A DataSet is an encapulated
> data package containing IL executable methods, a data
> structure relevant to the task, and perhaps also
> access rules.  The PNet work figures in here with both
> the IL compiler and the VM to execute it IL.  From the
> VRS perspective, this ia a way to move executable
> 'webservices' about a cluster transparently.  But they
> also seem to have some of the properties of 'agents'.

To me, you partly described Mobile Agents. "component webservice" you call it 
on the webpage. Are you sure this is just not another name for Mobile Agents?


> However, at this point, the thinking about DataSets is
> very embyonic and it needs a lot of attention that

Does DataSet have a widespread definition or is the definition local to this 
project?


>  We are creating the specs before we build.

Didn't someone recently mention a perl module?  :-)


> If you see a way that the value of the VRS can be added to,
> please talk about it.  We are all designing this thing
> from scratch.

Well, I don't know what value you want   :-)
What comes to my mind (because of the similar project goals) is that VRS 
could be a platform supporting p2p, mobile agents, vpn, fault tolerance, 
replication, distribution of power and space. SEE builds (whatever they want) 
on top of this, because everything you possibly could want is right there. 
This I'd like, but it may not be what you guys want or what DotGNU wants.

-- Tim