Subject: Re: SubAgent API

From: Randy Presuhn <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 23:01:10 -0700 (PDT)

Hi - 

> Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1998 01:59:51 -0400
> To: "Ramakumara.K" <[email-masked]>
> From: Bob Natale <[email-masked]>
> Subject: Re: SubAgent API
> Cc: [email-masked]
...
> My personal feeling is that we *should* do the API--even though
> personally I am somewhat inclined these days to avoid taking on
> additional standards-body work.  But that will remain an open
> WG decsion item until we actually develop and deliver such an API.
...

One important consideration (not necessarily a requirement) in the API
design is whether to base it on a "service definition" or on the protocol
specification.  The distinction is important.  The former is potentially
useful for other protocols, and is closer to the level of abstraction
a MIB implementor would be comfortable with.  The latter ends up being
inextricably tied to AgentX protocol (possibly even a specific version),
and tends to be at a gory bits and bytes level.

One COULD define an API that's little more than some structs and typedefs
that map directly onto the RFC 2257 PDU layouts.  Such an approach would
provide little value.

I think a higher level of abstraction is appropriate.  The part that
gets tricky in this is whether the dispatch of operations and execution
of access methods is handled within this API.  

Unfortunately, it's in this area where the API could provide the most
value that vendors' (and freely available) interfaces (MIB compiler
output, support libraries, and so on) differ in wildly incompatible
ways, even though the capability provided  may be remarkably similar.

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