Re: [DotGNU]Discussing future plans

[Mario D. Santana]

On Friday, January 3, 2003, at 05:46 PM, David Sugar wrote:
> I think it is important that people realize dotgnu is not just pnet 
> alone, and this is a great way to bring that message home if we can 
> also get MACS out.

Agreed. I won't deny my bias, but I think MACS will be the best 
general-purpose digital/virtual identity framework out there, including 
commercial offerings. I'm pretty confident that it can become a jewel 
in DotGNU's crown.

> On Friday 03 January 2003 11:18, Gopal V wrote:
> > Sorry to hear that ... and glad too ... having food-funding projects 
> > is
> > good :-)

I guess. Living at home, tightening my belt, living off of savings. I 
knew things were getting bad when I drove by a movie theater and didn't 
recognize any names on the billboard... But yeah, at least I have 
paying work. Hopefully I'll be able to temporarily "retire" again in a 
few months.

> > Ok, Still I'm off to give you some good PR and probably get it some
> > developer attention...

Awesome. I have to say, I appreciate the support you guys are showing. 
It helps with motivation. =) As you say, MACS can mature on the back 
burner while pnet and DGEE mature in the foreground. I think fitting 
MACS into a fairly complete architecture won't be as tricky as it 
sounds.

> > The only thing that's stopping me from helping is that it's in perl 
> > :-)

I know. I like perl for prototyping, and chunks of my projects end up 
staying in perl afterwards. But after the next release, one of the 
biggest questions will be a rewrite in a more appropriate languages. 
I'm hoping it will make sense to use pnet. Otherwise, there are a few 
other choices, some of them pretty esoteric. Like Erlang which gives 
tricky but useful things, like distributed load-balancing/HA and 
run-time code updating, for free. But I expect C# would let MACS 
integrate more cleanly with DotGNU.

As it stands, the perl pieces (core servers) are pretty simple. 
Already, about half the code is in C (the client parts) and will likely 
stay that way.

Now I feel like working on MACS. But I have to go brush up on my 
Portuguese instead, read some specs, and write filters. Egad. Maybe 
later. Enjoy your interesting work a little extra for me.

Cheers.

mds