Michael Sparks, Kamaelia, LLUP
Sylvain Hellegouarch
Long time no see. But as they say no news is good news... er... to be
fair in this case it's just no news.
I would like to introduce Michael Sparks who works at the BBC Research &
Development [1] department. Why do I present Michael to the list? Well a
week ago I came around the Kamaelia project [2] and of which Michael is
the project leader.
The Kamaelia project is a network oriented set of tools written in
Python to simply developer's life when implementing new protocols in
needs for heavy concurrency. Instead of trying to paraphrase the project
documentation let's see a quick extract:
"""
Take a person sitting at a desk in a world pre-desktop-computing. She
could have a bunch of inboxes & outboxes on her desk. Suppose that the
inboxes are labelled "timesheets", "newhires", "fires", and that the
outtrays are "accounts", "security", "HR".
She can work on messages she gets on inboxes, and generate messages on
outboxes. A postman then performs deliveries between the people - the
active objects. The postman knows where things are going, and therefore
if you need to add ing (say) auditing you can do that without modifying
the way the person/active object works.
This is precisely how Kamaelia works. It models itself on a real world
system to encourage behaviours that simplify concurrency.
"""
From that metaphor you can imagine why I got excited about the project
in context of LLUP (Blip messages travelling through BlogXast components
). Kamaelia is so much more than that and if you are interested I
invite you to have a look at the tutorial [3] and documentation [4].
Kamaelia is being under heavy use at the BBC to handle part of their
streaming and has proved to be extremely scalable already.
In the coming weeks, once I have finished the CherryPy book, I will
start toying with Kamaelia and implement a basic LLUP infrastructure
with the help of Russ and I'm sure Michael will advise us.
Indeed I think Michael is a pragmatic, there is nothing such as
implementations to understand if a protocol makes sense, its real
strengths and caveats. More to come therefore.
Again. Welcome Michael.
- Sylvain
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/index.shtml
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/projects/kamaelia/
[3] http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/MiniAxon/
[4] http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Docs/
Sylvain Hellegouarch
forget to include the email of person you introduce.
/me yawns
Mind you, I just gave you a recipe to make a fool of yourself for free.
Sorry for that.
- Sylvain
M. David Peterson
While I do believe we have a few things to offer you in regards to your overall vision, you obviously have quite a bit more to offer us in regards to both code and expertise. I've been digging into the code base of Kamaelia a bit, and have found plenty of similarities between Kamaelia, LLUP, AspectXML, AtomicXML, and the Xameleon project, all of which I believe can be easily integrated into Kamaelia and as such, offer a layer of aspect-oriented XML message weaving and agent based data processing that all builds on top of Atom data feeds, APP, and LLUP/Blip messaging.
I've been sorting code, moving things in and out of various repositories, trying to get things more organized. The core of all of this exists @ http://dev.extensibleforge.net/browser/trunk , the AspectXML code base @ http://code.google.com/p/aspectxml, and a few more pieces in some non-public repositories that I will be extracting and putting into the extensibleforge repository as time allows.
In the mean time my personal plan is to wrap my head around Kamaelia and the related projects and basically absorb as much as I can such that I can better understand where all of this can be integrated to create some pretty cool capabilities, much of which is outlined in the text Sylvain copied below. In other words, what we've been working on, what you've been working, what we've been thinking about and designing, and what you have been thinking about and designing, seem to mesh REALLY well, and I'm really looking forward to seeing just how well that might be.
Michael, I will report back again once I have had a chance to get my head around Kamaelia. No doubt there will be plenty of questions as I move forward. I would assume the forum to ask these questions is Kamaelia-list, using IRC for anything more discussion oriented. Is this correct?
Thanks for the intro, Sylvain! Looks like some fun times ahead, for sure :)
--
/M:D
M. David Peterson
http://mdavid.name | http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2354