On 10/28/2012 4:27 AM, Simon IJskes - QCG wrote:
On 25-10-12 18:55, Gregg Wonderly wrote:
- are you interested in river running on the internet?
On a TCP/IP network at large, yes. The internet has some certain
connotations that I am not sure how to quantify.
1. Do we mean everyone is untrusted and securing endpoints implies no
downloaded code?
>...
Why did you ask these questions, by the way?
This is what "internet version" means to me. Jini can work just fine over a
wide area network, with the appropriate networking configuration. So the only
thing that the internet presents as different is trust. I think about the how
the "web" works, where every single web page has "mobile code" in the form of
CSS and javascript/dhtml. This stuff has a more focused exposure of
functionality which is not "general computing" but rather "UI layout" and "GUI"
controls etc.
Typically, not having two way TCP connectivity makes it harder to get Jini to
work "completely right", but it's not required if you do somethings differently
at the client, such as polling the LUS and operating your own local cache of
services and their state/availabilty. When the client needs to use a service,
look it up again rather than using notifications to know that it is still
available. Notifications are not "fool proof" anyway, because there is still
latency between the time that the service stops working->disappears from the
LUS->you need to make a call into it. So, just notifications are, essentially,
worthless as a functionality for "using the service" and instead are a
convenience for "seeing the service".
Peter (and others over the past 15 or so years, but he is the most recent
champion of this) has talked about internet service location Services (maybe
ServiceRegistrar, but not necessary to be so). The whole notion of looking up
something, is very familiar from the google/web search perspective. But, our
brain, filtering the results and then selecting an applicable link, is more
likely to work, realistically with those kinds of results. Finding the right
service, I think, is a hugely more narrowed search, and instead, is more than
likely only a "hostname to IP address discovery" using DNS, and then MAYBE, a
few "Item"s of look up context for version, locale or other very concrete needs.
What I feel the larger issue is, generally, is that people don't know enough
about networking to use Jini in a WAN environment, because they just know about
port 80 based hacks for firewall traversal, and how to configure specific
routers to do that. If you really understand routing, VLANs and ports/NAT, you
typically can make the "connection" to the other end. Then, it just becomes
and issue of "authentication" and "authorization" to use the service on the
other end right?
Gregg Wonderly
