Apps Messaging -- A New Approach

[Mark Taylor]

Doug,

On Tue, 1 May 2007, Doug Tody wrote:

> The real solution to difficult problems such as security (or guaranteed
> and efficient message delivery, etc.) is to layer an implementation
> of an astronomical messaging abstraction on top of (ideally more
> than one) robust, highly evolved frameworks.  Either that, or keep
> it dead simple, and don't worry about these things.  I would suggest
> assigning responsibility for anything hard like this to the low level
> infrastructure, and not dealing with it at all at the applications layer
> (except maybe at connect time).  I still hear people talking about a "hub"
> which gets more and more complex, to the point where it is reinventing
> basic messaging technology which has been addressed for the past 15-20
> years, and impacts applications.  This is what "separate interface from

Which proposals are you calling "more and more complex"?
The only thing we're talking about for 'security' here is the hub 
generating one private token for each application at registration time 
which that application uses to identify itself in subsequent 
communications with the hub.  This provides, at low cost,
very basic protection against application spoofing or applications 
attempting to participate in a messaging conversation without first 
registering (I would argue that this kind of enforcement of good practice 
is a Good Thing in any case, even apart from the security aspect).
I agree if you want to provide facilities which are hard to do 
(encryption, guaranteed delivery, protection against determined hackers) 
the best thing is to defer to an infrastructure
which can do those hard things.  But if you defer too much to such
an infrastructure (that is, easy things which you need/want any time
you're doing messaging) it means that you cannot have an implementation 
which doesn't sit on top of a complex layer.

> implementation" ultimately means.  It doesn't necessarily mean making
> things more complex, as some fear - it could actually make it simpler
> at the applications level, due to layering.  - Doug

If you end up requiring one or other of the robust, highly evolved 
frameworks in order to do messaging at all then it becomes difficult
to do messaging in an environment which doesn't have support for 
any of those.  We are keen that there is a low burden for adoption 
on application authors working across a range of platforms.

Mark

-- 
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/