| [hyades-dev] Hyades protocol issues |
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In reflecting on the proposed Hyades protocol design, I’ve got a couple of concerns about which I wanted to solicit feedback.
First, although we allow messages to be sent to the HCE which contain a number of commands bundled together, there is no corresponding way for multiple replies to be bundled together and sent out from the HCE, nor can the commands be delivered in a single bundle, for instance, if they are all directed to the same agent. All commands going out from the HCE go out one-by-one. This is a consequence of the architecture we laid out for separating transport layer, payload normalizer and command extractor. It also seems to be a limitation of the current RAC implementation. I don’t think this is a huge limitation, and it may be worth accepting in order to keep the proposed architecture, but I wanted to specifically bring it up and see what other people thought.
Second, we have so far not proposed a way for agents to communicate with each other except by routing messages through the HCE, although I think we’ve talked about it. Since agents will generally be running on the same computer, it seems like it would sometimes be desirable to have them talk directly to one another. Agents could negotiate such a direct connection using their own proprietary commands, but if this sort of thing will be common, then I think we might prefer to have the HCE broker the conversation.
I would appreciate whatever perspectives on these issues any of you can offer.
Thanks, Andy |