SAMP draft document introduction

[Mark Taylor]

On Thu, 1 May 2008, Alasdair Allan wrote:

>> the method you're after is isAlive().  This is described at point 5 in sec 
>> 4.2:
>
> Ah!
>
> Should be listed in section 3.10 as an operation the hub must support, 
> surely? Which is where I was looking...

not unreasonable.  However, as I said:

> This is profile-dependent, since one could imagine other profiles
> in which, for instance, you can always assume that the messaging
> subsystem is present.

To elaborate: some of the participants in the debate prior to it
appearing on this list were concerned that "implementation details"
should be removed from the abstract API described in sec 3.10
and described only in relation to the particular choice of wire
protocol etc that we were using (i.e. the Standard Profile section).
The particular point of contention raised was including the 
private-key argument in methods described there.  I thought that 
the isAlive() method was in a similar class, so moved it out of 
the abstract API.  But maybe I was being overly picky.  I'm happy 
to move isAlive() back to where it can be more easily found, 
the abstract API, if nobody objects to that.  Anyone?

-- 
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/