Re: [school-discuss] ZIS Server (was: Project Proposal)

[Tonnesen Steve <tonnesen@cmsd.bc.ca>]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Les Richardson wrote:

> What can we build this thing with? Can it be built with Perl (since I'm a
> Perl Person) and some of the perl modules, etc. in conjunction with
> Apache, etc.
> 
> I also assume that at least initially it will only support a subset of the
> commands...(ie Zis_Ack).
> 
> What have to written your "ACK Server" in? <grin>

My "ACK Server" is written in Perl.  To be useful, the ZIS server has to
support most of the commands, but there aren't actually many of them.
Remember that the ZIS server actually has no idea what info it is passing
around, it is just a message passing facility.  It doesn't need to know
anything about SIS data or Library data.

I believe that the following is a complete list of types of messages that
can be passed: 

SIF_Register    - An agent like an SIS application registers itself as
SIF_Unregister    providing that type of data to SIF.  Only one agent can
                  register for each "type" of data.
SIF_Provide     - An agent announces that it "provides" a particular piece
SIF_Unprovide     of information.
SIF_Subscribe   - An agent announces that it wants to be notified of
SIF_Unsubscribe   changes to these objects
SIF_Event	- An agent announces a change in a particular event.
SIF_Request     - An agent requests a piece of information
SIF_Response    - An agent replies to a request
SIF_Ack         - An agent acknowledges that it received a message,
                  possibly indicating failure, or that a response will be
                  coming later.



There are still parts of this that are a little unclear in my mind, but I
think that covers the basics that are required.

Steve.