[vworld-tech] Straw poll...what are people working on?

[ceo]

Glyph Lefkowitz wrote:
> 
> On Dec 29, 2003, at 6:20 PM, Weston Fryatt wrote:
> 
>> My approach to an MMOG is I think a little difference than most MMOG that
>> are currently out there.  It "seems" that most MMOG run on one massive
>> server. (Maybe I'm wrong here)
> 
> 
> At least in my experience, your MMOG architecture is similar to many of 
> those out there.  To sum up the architecture in a few words, it's "many 
> special-purpose servers running on machines configured for those 
> purposes, in multiple fixed cluster constellations".  I think we need a 
> buzzword for that :).

Sounds like "Network-of-Clusters" to me? (in the tradition of NoW etc).

> My personal vision, though I've had very little time to work on it, is 
> to virtualize hardware use to the greatest extent possible, but of 
> course, reliable network operating systems are an unsolved (perhaps 
> unsolvable, with current technology) problem.
> 

I may have misunderstood you here (?), but reliable net-os's are 
definitely a "solved" problem, although the performance overhead is 
sufficiently high that they aren't always practical.

If you think about it, the international banking system would be in a 
lot of trouble without reliable net-os :).

> I don't know the rationale for splitting out special-purpose servers 
> instead of having one general-purpose platform which you load services 
> into, except "it's easier".

To people not accustomed to Dist-Sys it is more "natural", probably 
because it's an example of the classic "divide and conquer" approach to 
an unfamiliar field. It's just unfortunate that in reality it sucks for 
Dist-Sys :(.

> I've spent the last few years on a networking and protocol multiplexing 
> framework (http://www.twistedmatrix.com/) and now I'm working on an 
> e-mail solution which includes an object database 
> (http://www.divmod.com/) that I hope to use for a ... highly 
> unconventional online game, (http://www.divunal.com/).
> 

Twisted is neat (having watched for it for a while now), although I've 
always tended to think of it as "a simplified JBoss" - sort of like 
BASIC compared to C++; smaller, leaner, easier to use. If I were a 
Python programmer, I'm sure I'd use Twisted rather a lot...

Adam