Nail Soup

goran.krampe at bluefish.se goran.krampe at bluefish.se
Fri May 7 08:41:55 UTC 2004


Craig Latta <craig at netjam.org> wrote:
> Hi Dan--
> 
> 	I'd much rather use the Web just as much as necessary to escape the
> Web. :)  After you have Squeak running on someone's machine, why not use
> objects instead of webpages? Why not just have a peer-to-peer network of
> Squeaks talking to each other (exchanging modules, etc.)? Why do we need
> HTTP to intermediate?
>
> 	( http://netjam.org/squat )

I think I agree with Craig. Having worked with GemStone etc I think a
networked "common object world" or "shared Internet image" would be much
more interesting. Escaping the web. The web is nice for many things,
like entry points, because of two simple aspects:

- Everyone knows how to get to a URL.
- Nothing needed to install

But a part from that the web simply sucks. :)

This shared object world is of course a bit what Croquet is aiming at.
But I would settle for a more conventional transactional shared object
space, like GemStone offers.

I have earlier toyed with the idea to "test" this idea of a large scale
(=many clients) sharing of a common transactional image using Magma for
SqueakMap. The idea was to simply set up SM as a Magma server and then
let all SM clients (=all of us) simply connect to it.

Chris told me that Magma should in theory scale pretty good this way.
The thing that stopped me earlier was the prereq of forcing SM users to
have the Magma client part in their images. And of course the fact that
this was a "high tech" solution compared to the current much more low
tech solution. For example, the current scheme just uses HTTP so
firewalls/proxies are not a problem.

regards, Göran



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