Re: [Mldonkey-users] Server interfacing

[luculus]

Hi!

Am Montag, 27. Januar 2003 03:41 schrieb Chris Chabot:
> .ini files, and telnet connection to collect all the
> information.

Which is tedious and error-prone. Have a look at the GUI-Protocol, which is 
briefly described in interface_protocol.txt in the source distribution. It 
has the advantage, that you just have to build the handling code for the 
packets you are interested in. The details for dataypes and un-/marshaling 
are available in the sources (guiTypes.ml, commonTypes.ml, guiProto.ml, 
guiDecoding.ml, et.al.).

I would say that XML is nice but why not go a step further and use SOAP? This 
would also take care of the tedious un-/marshaling. I think there is no need 
for the core and the gui to use a similar protocol like the core uses to talk 
to servers and peers, besides the code reuse. In the latter case efficiency, 
size and performance are crucial with 1:n connections (>10³). In the former 
case you can go for convenience, because with 1:m connectins (<10) the 
overhead of XML and the marshaling isn't too much of a burden for the core.

The effort of using SOAP to implement the GUI-Protocol depends on whether the 
mldonkey developer team wants to support easy implementation of a wide 
variety of GUIs written in other languages than ocaml. This could be true, if 
the team decides to concentrate on the core development.