On Fri, May 24, 2002 at 06:23:41PM +0100, Chris Ball wrote: > Tony> As an example, think of a web-based corporate 'address book' > Tony> application. ... it's relatively > Tony> simple to have that move to each employee's PC (which may well > Tony> be more powerful than the server), at least for querying - but > Tony> still as a web-based application. > But, it's not. That's a potentially huge amount of data; people aren't > going to want to transfer that data to every machine they might want to > use, they're going to want a nice, central, authoritative LDAP server to > talk to.
They don't have to transfer it to every machine. Their sys-admin can have the initial version set up on their machine. If they need to use a machine that doesn't have it installed, then it can ask the server - or any of the many desktop servers that now exist. And, it could locally cache all the information that it retrieves, so that it gradually builds up the information that it needs. > There's lots of talk of making decentralised search engines, too, which > I also don't see the point of. I also don't see the point of these. > I like the idea of p2p a lot, but there are so many scenarios in which > it cripples the service it's trying to decentralise.. I agree completely. I just don't think an address book is one of them... Tony
