Hi, in 2007 I did the Apache Bennu proposal [1]. I think at that time the proposal did not find plenty of traction but the idea of componentizing every service found on a router/firewall sounds similar to what you are describing. At that time the idea as well was to not use Apache HTTPd on embedded small, factor devices but on regular devices such as 19" rack mount units. So the component model was actually meant to abstract the concrete implementation.
The proposal was specific to a few use cases such as routers, firewalls, Wi-Fi hotspots etc. at that point in time but in the mean time I refined the idea to be completely pervasive and thus it isn't bound to those original use cases any more. I as well had in mind to virtualize services on demand found on a router/firewall such as a packet filter in support of scaling the complete solution (e.g. an embedded router works well in small branch offices but during time as the office grows it might make sense to move such self-hosted services into a data center in support of a scale out scenario). VRouter [2] later on has been initiated as a completely independent project which has a similar goal I suppose. It could probably be that I failed to describe the ideas I had in mind in that very proposal and thus I failed in communicating well what I have in mind :) [1] http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/BennuProposal [2] http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/vrouter/ Cheers Daniel On Sat, Oct 8, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Giorgio Zoppi <giorgio.zo...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2011/10/8 dsh <daniel.hais...@googlemail.com>: >> Hi, >> >> are you targeting for end user devices such as tablets, cell phones >> etc.? at network devices such as embedded routers, firewalls, a NAS >> etc. or are you thinking of something that's really agnostic and thus >> more pervasive and hence could be run on any of the use case scenarios >> mentioned? > > I think something that is pervasive. If something is small you can add > or remove things at compile time. In my work, we are used to do so > with printer, > we have designer printer or large format printer...if we want build a > runtime for big printer we add different components...that is what > it's intended a component model. I dont wanna bind it for example to > Apache webserver for http. Small, tiny, extendible are the key > concepts. > > Cheers, > Giorgio. >
