Applications Messaging Standard

[Doug Tody]

Hi John -

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, John Taylor wrote:
>> BTW, scanning the recent messages I still see a lot about dot files
>> etc.  This is an implementation issue; platform specific issues such
>> as dot files in U*nix can be dealt with by the implementation, and
>> do not have to be addressed by the standard protocol.
>
> Yes and no.   How one goes about getting the information required to connect 
> could be part of the protocol.  You've already mentioned passing this in on 
> the commandline when you start an application.  Another (and arguably more 
> user-friendly) way would be to put this information in a well-known location 
> on the file system where client applications can find it.

The information content and how it is used in operations could be
part of the protocol; how it is stored externally is part of the
implementation.  User interface issues such as providing a file-based
configuration mechanism which the user could edit is an implementation
issue; a different implementation could store the same information
in a different fashion.  That is not to say that it is not important,
just that it is important to separate the two concerns.

Specifying connection information on the command line when an app is
started is not normally something one would do in a user interface,
rather such arguments would probably be autogenerated transparent
to the user, when the actual user interface (e.g., a CLI, some GUI,
etc.)  starts up the applications participating in the session.
This is runtime information used to tell apps how to dynamically
connect to a session; it is hard to even see how to reliably pass
such information via files, even if we ignore issues such as could
occur in a distributed or heterogeneous environment.

 	- Doug