Subject: [Taps] How composable stacks can interoperate: Flexinet (1998)

From: Michael Welzl <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2014 22:49:14 +0200

Dear all,

I just took a look at the management interface of the old TAPS list, and coincidentially found a bounced message there that Bob Briscoe tried to send to the list on 5 March; it seems it never made it through on either of the lists! My sincere apologies to everyone and above all, to Bob, for this! Strange that the system didn't just "say no"... the new list was created on 6 March, so I guess that happened just before the move and in the process this trouble happened... very very sorry.

So here it is, in all its glory - old but still interesting. Sorry once again!

Cheers,
Michael

------

TAPS folks,

When you allow a programme to create its protocol stack from its 
requirements, the choices have to be the same for the other 
correspondents in the session - they have to interoperate. Flexinet 
addressed this problem (amongst others).

Flexinet communicates a stack /name/ between all the participants in 
the session. The neat idea in Flexinet is that the name the 
programmer gives to the composition of components that comprise a 
stack is itself a name object, which contains the specification for 
how the stack is composed.

[BTW, Flexinet was for higher layers (mostly OSI L5-7), which is 
where I think this composable stack stuff makes more sense, and has 
been more successful in the past. My main concern is that I doubt 
programmers will want to lose control over their choice of transport 
protocol, because L4 is where all the partial reliability is done 
(because the network underneath is unreliable in all senses of the 
word - packets get lost, connectivity gets lost, etc). The programmer 
has to to handle all the exceptions, which will depend on the protocol choice.]

I've found a bootlegged copy of the paper here: 
<www.dsg.cs.tcd.ie/~vjcahill/sigops98/papers/hayton.ps>, or you can 
pay Springer for it if you prefer.

Given time I could retrieve the Flexinet java code (if I could find 
my archived copy of the ANSA site it was on), but that's not the 
important thing - it's the idea of the name object that is worth re-using.

@INPROCEEDINGS{Hayton98:Flexinet,
   author = {Richard Hayton and Andrew Herbert and Douglas Donaldson},
   title = {{FlexiNet --- A flexible component oriented middleware system}{}},
   booktitle = {Proc. SIGOPS'98},
   year = {1998},
   affiliation = {APM},
   keywords = {Data Communication, Networks, Internet, Computing, 
Software Engineering,
         Object-Oriented, Mobility, Multimedia, Quality of Service, 
QoS, Management,
         Adaptation, Architecture, Middleware, Layering, Reflection, Java},
   owner = {RJB},
   timestamp = {1998.05.11},
   url = {\url{http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=319199}}
}

Bob

________________________________________________________________
Bob Briscoe,                                                  BT

---

From: Joe Touch <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 15:18:31 -0700

FWIW, this was a focus of a lot of what was called "middleware" in the 
late 1990s. There's also plenty of more recent work in this area (e.g., 
SILO at NCSU).

Joe

On 4/4/2014 1:49 PM, Michael Welzl wrote:
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