Re: Protocols and Plans

> We first have to choose wether the applet send commands which are
My idea would be that the client would send (via whatever protocol) the action, directive name and optionally the value of the directive to the server. The action would be SET or GET (per the ramblings paper), the environment, the directive would be a verbatim string and the value would be a list of strings. For instance to set the server type you might send:

SET GLOBAL ServerType Standalone

It would be up to the server to parse this and verify that:

• the environment (global or a specific server such as www.disa.mil) exists
• the directive exists (send an asychronous error message back if it doesn't)
• the value being set is appropriate (also send error back if SET GLOBAL ServerType 116.117 was sent as a message to the server.) In this case only the values "standalone" and "inetd" would be acceptable.
• this is either a new directive (in which case it must be inserted into the proper file) or that it is a change to an existing directive whose value must be updated.

This message would be captured, parsed and handled by an event loop. The error checking has to be done on the server end to accomodate people sending scripted commands to it. We might assume that the GUI would always send correctly configured commands but we can't make the same assumption about scripts.

I don't see any easy way around recompilation of the server and client GUI to accomodate new core directives. This is because not only may the format of the directives change but also their importance in the hierarchy (for instance, only certain directives may appear in an .htaccess file or within <DIRECTORY> tags). Perhaps there's an elegant way to capture this information in an elegant text-based configuration file but it's not readily apparent to me. The handling of modules is a little different, this should be able to be done on the fly by having a module specific class built and it's methods called when the module is included in the server (either through a dynamic library aka "DLL" in microsoft speak or by inclusion in a static compilation).

 If we specify a standard template class for modules authors of modules could include the configuration class or we could easily build them. The class would just have to say what directives were legal, type valid value types for the directive (eg IP address, binary switch, integer, etc) and within what context (eg .htaccess, etc). Now that I'm thinking about it this same idea could be extended to the core directives and to some extent within the client as well. I'm pretty certain that most changes in directives and functionality will require a recompile of the client and the server. This isn't a biggie in my estimation though as we only need to make one .class set for all platforms (gotta love java!) and eventually the directives will settle down. For all this discussion I don't think there will be many changes except at major versions.

(Randy- what do you think of this idea? Also, Randy, can you accept HTML format mail?).

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> Chatting is a little hard to arrange, do u have IRC client? I'l be
 I'll find out if I have one; I'm sure there's one available I'll just build it and try this stuff out. I may try tonight or if not then when I get back from the beach :) on Sunday.

Justin Received on Fri Aug 15 14:31:35 1997