[Fwd: What's going on with this DGS stuff anyways?] (fwd)

[Todd Graham Lewis <tlewis mindspring net>]

I thought that GNOMErs might find this tidbit interesting.

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Todd Graham Lewis            32°49'N,83°36'W          (800) 719-4664, x2804
******Linux******         MindSpring Enterprises      tlewis@mindspring.net

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• From: Scott Christley <scottc net-community com>
• To: GNUstep Discussion <discuss-gnustep gnu org>
• Subject: What's going on with this DGS stuff anyways?
• Date: Wed, 05 Aug 1998 22:16:47 -0700

Good question, and it seems numerous people are asking the same thing so
I will try to answer, but first let me give you some history.

As some may know I started a company oh 3 years ago by the name of
NET-Community, at the time I was doing internet game stuff, and building
that technology along with advancing GNUstep which was to be a vital
core of the whole technology.  Well NET-Community is now essentially
defunct and I have moved on though I still own all of the software and
the computer equipment.  I contracted for about 6 months, first at
Sequent then at Oracle, was offered a great position at Oracle and
seeing that I dislike consulting, I went full-time.

At Oracle, I am the Principal QA Engineer for testing Oracle's
Application Server (OAS).  OAS is a monster project almost as big as
their database that is composed of an ORB, web server, CORBA name and
event service, distributed transaction service, message queue service,
the "cartridge" technology, load balancing, and performance monitor.
Tons of C and JAVA code and some C++ support to keep the drones happy.
Oracle is correct in their vision that distributed applications is going
to become the big bucks market over the next years eventually eclipsing
database revenue.  It's some really exciting shit especially with Oracle
now supporting Linux, you can expect OAS to be on Linux and kicking NT's
ass within a year or two; though Java has got to get faster on Linux.

So anyways onto DGS.

It's unclear whether the contract between Peter and NET-Community for
Peter to add a number of enhancements to ghostscript is terminated or
not; NETC hasn't terminated nor has Peter done such, so as far as I'm
concerned it's still on if currently inactive.  Peter has already done a
large chunk of work so now it's on my shoulder to finalize the
networking and communication piece; the hack in the currently available
DGS.

I've taken the machine that Oracle gives me for a home pc, kept it at
work, and installed Linux on it.  I will be using it to do DGS
development.  One problem is that Oracle's firewall is extremely tight,
so I have a local CVS which I will use for source control and I will
occasionally sync it with the GNUstep CVS.

As for the design, I have it all down on paper(and chalkboard) and if I
can get some dedicated time I should be able to implement it in a couple
of weeks.  DGS is going to require kernel threads, there is no way
around it without making it ugly, so I'm going to require threads and do
the clean design.  I'm not going to go into detail about the design now
because it will take me a couple of hours to get it down in an email in
sufficient detail.  Suffice it to say that it's the classic problem of a
server which can handle multiple client connections with the additional
twist that each client connection can have multiple contexts across the
same connection.  Think asynchronous events, message queues, a pool of
worker threads, and possibly a hash table thrown in.  I will actually
find the implementation quite enjoyable if ghostscript doesn't throw me
too many curves.  Peter has done all the work to support multiple
contexts, alpha channel, and compositing images though it's only gone
through unit tests, so we can gain alot in a short period of time.

Along with this I'm tossing out this Imake garbage that the DPS client
library uses and provide better support for the Makefile Package.  I
don't intend to make DGS dependent upon GNUstep because there are many
people who have expressed interest in DGS without GNUstep, but I will
try to make the integration tight if it will be used in a GNUstep
environment.

Feel free to ask any questions.

cheers
Scott

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