Hi, On Mon, 30 May 2005, Andre Merzky wrote:
If you want middleware providers to support the interface specifying how protocol plugins are added in is as important as specifying how users will expect to use the APIs.
You might be right - but I am not sure. If every middleware provider _can_ implement its own SAGA version in whatever way he wants, hi might actually do that.
If there at some point is a SAGA implementation which allows well defined plugins, the middleware providers might use that instead, or _still_ want to implementis their own way.
To be sure: we want to have a pluggable implementation (and in fact we work on such one), but that plugin specification should, in our opinion, totally distinct from the SAGA API spec.
What do otheres think about this issue?
SAGA aims to provide an API for at the application developer level, and not at the level where middleware may be plugged in; we are concentrating on the API from that level, and not specifying architecture - specifying an API to add protocol plug-ins would be out of scope. We want to keep this API small, and focussed on the application developers, giving SAGA implementors maximum freedom within that. I would hope that any implementation which is plug-in based would provide suitable documentation as to its use, and possible at a future date a working group could be setup to standardise such interfaces, but I think it is out of scope for the current group, and probably premature to try it. Cheers, Tom