it was pointed out to me by james that the name service was a bit
confused in its roll by mixing up the idea of
name translation with the ideas of failover, replication, clustering,
and grouping of services. while those ideas
are important in a distributed system, they deserve their own specific
treatment and should not be part of the
name service itself. (replication of name servers itself is needed, but
subject to a different discussion.)
manoj and i reviewed the proposal for name service and struck the
requirements that were specifically not
related to implementing a basic name service. while replication of a
name service is still important, and
ought to be present, we feel we could make a good first cut without the
specific requirement and then see
where we can go.
so we adjusted the proposal and fiddled the wording a bit to account for
the shift in focus:
http://cwiki.apache.org/ETCH/etch-name-service.html
here are the important design principles as we see them:
1) a service or application should not have be overtly aware of the name
service. it should be possible to
deploy a service or application with or without the name service, with
no conditional code or changes
to code. thus use of a name service is purely a deployment consideration
and is not required.
2) the name service should be supportable in a variety of styles or
modes without changing the
fundamental functional interface. indeed, the basic contract should be
very simple.
we've not updated the ns.etch file to match yet. probably today.
thoughts? ideas? over the next few days manoj and i will publish some
call flows and code snips to
illustrate these ideas.
scott out
