Re: [GNUnet-developers] OS-independent GUI, poor client-server messages

[Christian Grothoff]

On Tuesday 24 Aug 2004 2:39 am, hwkks wrote:
> Hi list,
> I just thought about writing an OS-independent GUI in Java (yes, I know,
> Java sucks), but then I saw that the client-server messages are very poor.
>
>     * RETURN_VALUE
>     * GET_STATISTICS
>     * STATISTICS
>     * TRAFFIC_QUERY
>     * TRAFFIC_INFO
>     * SHUTDOWN_REQUEST
>     * GET_OPTION_REQUEST
>     * GET_OPTION_REPLY
>
> There seems to be no way to search, to download or to view current
> downloads. Are you planning to implement this soon?

Well, how do you think the current clients work? :-).  As Nils already said, 
you missed half the message definitions.  Anyway, you may not want to deal 
with this low-level messaging anyway.  The GNUnet client (and in particular 
the libesed2 library) have to do a lot more than just issue a single 'search' 
or 'download' query.  But as Nils also mentioned, there is freeway.  Freeway 
(re)implements (most of) libesed2 in Java, from message handling to the GUI. 
I would suggest that you look into the freeway code.

> The biggest disadvantage in GNUnet in my opinion is the lack of files
> which depends on the count of people who contribute to this net. But you
> will only get more people to this net when it is more user friendly. I
> like console-style but a lot of people think different and a GUI for all
> platforms could be a good solution. Hope you think similar.

Well, I believe the number of users / portability is an issue, but I'm not 
sure that it is the biggest one; nevertheless, you're welcome to try to 
improve the situation ;-).

Christian