Andre, Andre Merzky wrote:
Quoting [Hidemoto Nakada] (Apr 21 2006):
All,
sorry for not being able to attend the call. here are some comment on GridRPC.
No problem - we realise it was on short notice.
Andre Merzky wrote:
- SAGA and GridRPC: - some progress on mailing list - two potential point of conflict with current GridRPC API - config file exposes implementation on API level what is the canonical way in SAGA to path optional configuration information to a binary?
The spec is silent about configuration :-(. The SAGA approach however would be to move that responsibility away from end user level, to the administrator level. For example, environment specific configurations should be performed by the administrator who installes SAGA, not by the programmer who uses SAGA.
a specific-named file in the current working directory might work as well.
That is probably convenient and useful - but should, IMHO, the last resort. A search for configuration in some other predefined places, such as
$INSTALL_ROOT/share/saga.ini /etc/saga.ini ~/.saga.ini `pwd`/saga.ini (that at last)
would, as described above, allow the administrator to configure SAGA
We also have to keep in mind that we might need configuration for not only RPC, but for other parts of SAGA as well. Multiple config files are probably not a good option, or at least not in multiple formats. So just including the RPC config handling as is is, unfortunately, not advisable IMHO.
I agree. Do you think you will specify a specific configuration format for SAGA API, like Java specifies properties file format? In our experience, Java properties syntax is not powerful enough for our config files.
- varargs are used, which we did not consider yet (SIDL?)
To have single argument array might be the easiest solution.
Right, but you loose type conversion that way. I originally thought you use an array of strings - and only realised by looking at the implementations that varargs are used.
The good thing about that is that it looks VERY simple from end user side. At least for C programmers, its also very familiar. For Java it might be impossible.
Note that in C varargs, type check will not happen in anytime. Java, from JDK1.5, provides automatic conversion from vararg type call to Object array and automatic primitive type boxing. with them we can use effectively same notation in Java. in Java, you can type check at execution time.
So, one approach would be to define a single arg array, as you propose, in the spec, but allow the language bindings to implement that with varargs.
-hidemoto