TC June 1, 2007
From Croquet Consortium
Qwaq Inc. once again graciously hosted the technical committee meeting in Qwaq Forums. Discussion centered mostly around item 3 of the Jabberwocky plan.
3.) Not just a client, but an ecosystem.
META-DATA SERVICE SPEC (status: strawman)
mapping of arbitrary string keys to aribitrary string values
OPERATIONS:
- join (establishes service) => theService
- at: aKey => aValue
- at: aKey put: aValue
- remove aKey
PRIMARY USE CASES: at: anIslandID put: aCurrentRouterIPAddress at: ???? put: anXMLPostcard
CHARACTERISTICS:
Slowly changing data.
Users want specific values on demand, but do not need (or want) to get a whole copy of all the data (all key/value pairs). (i.e., Islands are not the right thing.)
No need to be notified of changes. (Could be layered service.) Clients poll when they need something.
Reading is anonymous, unauthenticated. (Private data can be on some other service.)
Initially a small enough amount of data and traffic that a single host is ok. (E.g., #join constructs a socket that the other requests are made over.) Later this can be more distributed. (E.g., #join answers with a peer or some other entity that can handle requests that is not the well-known iniitial machine.)
ISSUES:
How do we prevent "wiki wars" (spoofing)? -- Require authentication to write? Who maintains authentications? -- Receive "capability" to change an in-use key value when you write to it, and require that capability to write or remove?
IMPLEMENTATION POSSIBILITIES: - router/controller "meta-island" now, DHT later - Web page now, Web service later
