Summary of the Applications Messaging Discussion

Areas where we agree:

• We will concentrate on application to application messaging for a single user on a single machine
• We will have a hub/daemon process to control the messaging
• The messaging system will be kept simple: no encryption, no transactions, guaranteed delivery etc
• The messaging protocol will be decoupled from the semantics of the messages

Areas where we probably agree

• The messaging protocol will be defined independently of the details of any concrete implementation (this does not preclude such details also forming part of the specification)
• Applications are free to spawn/include an instance of the hub/daemon, but should behave "nicely" (TBD) if they shut down or one is already running.
• We won't attempt any clever hand-over from one hub/daemon instance to another.
• Applications will be located dynamically (through the hub?), rather than from a remote or local registry
• The mechanism used to bootstrap the connection to the hub/daemon will be simple

Areas still to be discussed/agreed

• A representative list of use cases (see follow up)
• Precisely how we bootstrap the connection to the Hub/daemon
• The messaging protocol
• Which "wire" protocol(s) to use
• Pretty much everything to do with the messages themselves
• What we should aim to achieve by May

As of 14 Mar 2007