Hi all, attached is yet-another-proposal for a future SAGA extension. Please note that this proposal is not intended to enter the SAGA API draft anytime soon - however, it would be nice to get feedback on this early on. Motivation: Interfaces to information Services are _neccessary_ on Grid Middleware Level, in order to allow informed decisions of resource avialability, to store persitant information about system configurations etc. Well, you know. On application level, a number of uses cases require (or at least can benefit) from a interface to persistent global information storage as well. A simple example is a streaming server and client, where the handshaking procedure is greatly simplified by read/write access to such an information repository - all other solutions need global knowledge. In GridLab (and the GAT), we have very good experiences with what we called the AdvertService. It allowed to publish metadata tables (named adverts, just a list of key value pairs really) in a globally visible name space. For the example above, the streaming server could publich an URL at /home/andre/my_stream_urls/test-server.url, and attach meta data to it, such as: "url" = "http://remote.host.net:1234/test" "desc" = "my super service URL" "contact" = "merzky@cs.vu.nl" We used that service in a number of scenarios. SAGA: in SAGA, a specification of an advert service would be trivial. In fact, the complete spec would be: namespace saga { class advert implements-all name_space_entry implements-all attributes implements-all permissions { }; class advert-dierctory implements-all name_space_directory implements-all permissions { }; } Thats all for now, really - as usual, any feedback would be welcome :-) Cheers, Andre. -- +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Andre Merzky | phon: +31 - 20 - 598 - 7759 | | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) | fax : +31 - 20 - 598 - 7653 | | Dept. of Computer Science | mail: merzky@cs.vu.nl | | De Boelelaan 1083a | www: http://www.merzky.net | | 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands | | +-----------------------------------------------------------------+