[circle] circle's old daemons : an essay on the separation between the gui and core....

[Thomas Voegtlin]

Steven and Julie wrote:

> Out of curiosity, do circle and circled both make their own connection to the circle network?  I wonder if it wouldn't be best to make the circle client start up and use circled as its protocol layer.  It might make some little things a little more painful, but shouldn't be too bad. 
yes, separation between gui and core is the holy grail of circle.
Thomas Mangin tried to put his hands on it, but I think that he burned them.

I agree that circled is the road to follow.

> Then, if circled had a kind of reference counting feature.  A reference being the use of "circled start|stop", a unix socket which apps can open (and will automatically unreference also), 
circled already has that.

> whatever method would be needed to get it to work under winblows (a 
> localhost-only bound inet listening socket, perhaps), and a temporary reference 
> (via command-line args to a circle-remote client, or something) which dies if 
> it's not re-used in some period of time (useful from a CGI page, for example)...
>
> Also of benefit, would be the ability for a site to run circled as user "circle".  
at this point, circled does not register itself as a user.

> And perhaps move some of the user configuration (like that lovely 16-character 
> 'name') into circled's config instead, therefor protecting some of circle's 
> mechanics from users not smart enough to install their own client.  It may also 
> have the effect of cutting down on the number of circle threads running on a 
> multi-user system.
>  
I do not see the point here... why would the daemon need a name?

> It'd also make it much easier to implement new interfaces, esp. ones written in 
> something other than python.
yes, this is what I am currently doing with Mozilla.
I added commands to the daemon, so that it can
perform searches in circle and download files.
I think it would be easy to use circled for all
the operations that involve the hashtable.

So here is my proposal, if we want to separate gui and core of circle:

We could use circled and use the 'get' and 'search' commands I added to it.
[and slightly modify them, because at this point they return html-formatted
results. Html (or any other format) should be the business of the 
client...]

For chat, the gui would ask to the daemon the list of people on a channel.
However, I think it should bypass the daemon for sending messages, once
it knows the list of recipients.

the advantage of using circled is that it is possible to achieve separation
progressively, which should be much easier than to rewrite everything 
from scratch.

Thomas