[DotGNU]A plan for DotGNU: Rudolf

[Peter Minten]

Hi folks,

I worked out the idea of DotGNU + Fox a little further. This is a plan for the
first DotGNU distribution using Fox, comments very welcome. Note that this plan
is not very flexible and additional arrangements will have to be made for full
.NET compatibility. It allows however a very high degree of code reuse.

Since every good plan needs a good name and Christmas is only a week ago I'm
calling this one Rudolf.

The first major difference between this plan and the old DotGNU schemes is that
GNU-RPC is dumped in favor of Jabber/XML-RPC (AKA Jabber-RPC). This is needed
because GNU-RPC is not moving AFAIK and getting a SWIGable (C/C++) lib for it up
and running would take about a year. 

Jabber-RPC is a pretty simple standard and it can easily be integrated in
XML-RPC using applications (DGEE). It's also compatible with the service level
plans. We can even simplify the session managment since Jabber-RPC communication
uses a constant connection so there is no need for sending the session key every
time.

The role of the Bulter is increased to that of a DGCE (DotGNU Client
Enviroment). In Rudolf the Bulter handles connecting, authentication and the
whole encryption stuff transparently. It also extracts XML containing the FOX
message from Jabber-RPC messages and sends it through a pipe to the application
frontend running on the client.

Inside the application frontend process the DotGNU Translator component watches
the pipe to the Butler. When a FOX message in XML comes in it parses it and
sends it on to the receiver.

In diagram form it looks like this:

+--------------------+
|   User Interface   |
|                    |
| +----------------+ |
| |      FOX       | |
| +----------------+ |
|        |||         |
| +----------------+ |   +----------+             +--------+
| |   Translator   |<--->|  Butler  |<===========>|  DGEE  |
| +----------------+ |   +----------+             +--------+
+--------------------+

On the server side a translator and some library functions to emulate Fox will
be needed but that shouldn't pose a problem.

Greetings,

Peter