[dorkbotsea-blabber] EC backbone thoughts

[eric.mcneill at gmail.com]

Michelle graciously volunteered to sketch out some ideas for our Emergent  
Communication backbone. I thought I'd throw out some random thoughts to  
(hopefully) help her out a little, get some ideas flowing...

Re the text "stream" at its heart - actually I like the term "flow" better,  
since "streaming" has a connotation these days which isn't what we're going  
for, I think.

What about a temporary holding cell for msgs, something with a limited size  
where msgs can expire over time or get bumped out. Maybe there'd be a  
Wayback Machine plug-in that could do more extensive archiving, w/  
occasional retrieval of old stuff. But the core would be a smaller msg set  
representing the current conversation.

An alert/event system, where a plug-in can register to get notified of new  
msgs. Plug-ins could get all new msgs and then if they want to filter on  
just the "R" words they can do that. A reusable filter interface would let  
other plug-ins share code.

Should plug-ins and/or pieces have registered identities, so if a piece  
wants to it can check to see if its friends are there? Likewise should  
pieces register a small set of capabilities?

Some limiters/throttlers may be required. If we've got an email plugin it'd  
be a trip to see it get on some spam lists and see what that does to the  
system, but all in good measure.

Knobs for tweaking the flow in real time would help.

What language to write the core server in? Requirements: Fast/easy,  
well-known by the group and moderately powerful/flexible. I'm thinking Java  
or Python would probably fit the bill but am open to whatever.

Use sockets for core-to-plugin communication? Then plug-ins can be in  
whatever language, and remote, though it adds a little complexity. Or we  
could have plug-in proxy, say, a local Java plug-in that proxies  
functionality to remote plug-ins.

Have different levels of msgs, or threading? For example, the msg "this  
project is rad" comes in and some repeater piece produces three more  
msgs "this this this project", "project rad rad", "this this is is is is" -  
does everyone necessarily always want every msg? Or do msgs have a limited  
amount of threading - "msg 499 is in response to msg 485" - that pieces can  
use to glom onto particular threads if they want, or just take top-leve  
msgs?

Eric
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