Dear Steve, We are looking forward to hearing your alternatives to the current direction. Could you talk little about it published?
The reasons of lack of improvements on the core communication tools of the AG (vic and rat) may be due to their inflexible architecture. We also think VIC & RAT should be replaced by one of new framework and new architecture to improve it's useability and extensibility. Before the day comes out, we would continue to make these tools (vic &rat) better. BTW, we plan to release MPEG4/H.264-enable vic and software based acoustic echo cancellation-enable rat in the late June. Regards, Barz On 5/20/05, Steve Smith <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > I'd like to remedy any lack of information that's out there, and you'll see efforts in the > near term to do so. While we're in this intermediate state, let us know of questions so > we can address them. Thanks Tom. I have a couple of concerns with the current state of affairs. One is that the current AGTK is an implementation rather than a protocol; i.e. it relies on a particular version of globus and other packages, and it is all but impossible to interoperate with it. I would like a simple method to integrate other app into an AG session without having to rely on massive third-party libraries. Another is that the web-services/globus architecture is a poor match for the semantics of how we use AG; conceptually the AG is connection-oriented, but globus/WS is oriented towards transient connections. I think these two problems have forced to development of AG to focus on the AGTK, which should really be the simplest component. This leads to the third problem, which is that the core communication tools of the AG (vic and rat) are being neglected, and need a major overhaul. A lot of the complexity and poor usability of the AG comes from these tools and the necessity of the AGTK to work around their limitations (vic especially), There is some good work being done on vic replacement but the Markus' ANU team, but that only addresses part of the problem, and may not suit all configurations. I've done some basic work on cleaning up the core and hope to be able to dedicate more time to it soon, and Douglas at UQ is doing some work, but we really need more people on it. Unfortunately it's not a sexy job. Anyway, I'm currently writing a paper for the APAC conference about some alternatives to the current direction. I believe you're heading over for that conference so it would be good to talk then. Cheers, Steve
