goran.krampe at bluefish.se wrote:

> Richard Staehli <rastaehli at mac.com> wrote:
>>
>> A few bullet points regarding how I hope SM (or other Squeak module
>> architecture) will evolve:
>> - persistent object names based on logical repositories not tied to an
>> internet name
>> - peer-to-peer protocol for creating and maintaining global persistent
>> object (including code) repository
>> - code references component types, allowing substitution of
>> implementation (classes)
>>
>> I'd also like security mechanisms assure that code from a trusted
>> repository is unaltered.
>
> As soon as you want to talk - I am here. :) The two first points you
> raise I will probably not pursue early - the first one I am not exactly
> sure what it means, but I assume it has to do with moving away from 
> URLs
> and having a global shared object space instead somehow. The second has
> to do with the same thing, although p2p generally is complicated and
> beside the buzzword value, I would like to know the benefits compared 
> to
> say a more structured tree of servers.

You got it right.  A global shared namespace like ISBNs for books, and 
for the same reason.  Except that I prefer a hierarchical namespace 
like internet domain names.  I don't think we are ready for this now in 
Squeak, so I'm not proposing it now.

Yes P2P is a buzzword, but it has the nice property that you can 
release a system configured with some initial hints of how to contact 
servers and if some of those hints are good, the system can discover 
the rest of the global namespace.  You "never" have to update clients 
when the servers change.  Of course, DNS and IP routing has some of the 
same properties: if your client tries to access www.google.com it 
works, even if Google has changed the IP address of the server handling 
your request, but this is another old/new discussion that we don't want 
to have on this list now.

Richard