FW: [ace-research] Reminder: development meeting with Argonne folks, 4pm ET today

[Ivan R. Judson]

Eric and Susanne,

We're meeting with them in whatever node Eric made arrangements for :-)

3pm.

--Ivan 

-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Corrie [mailto:bcorrie at sfu.ca] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 23, 2004 11:04 AM
To: Ivan R. Judson
Cc: ace-research at yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [ace-research] Reminder: development meeting with Argonne
folks, 4pm ET today

Hi Ivan,

Andrew has given a high level overview of some of the topics we would like
to discuss (see his email below). It starts with a description of our vision
of how venues may work in the future. You may recognize this as similar to
the discussion we had at the pub during the developers sig.

To make this fairly concrete, I will try to paint a scenario for this.

Our ACE service isn't truly a service or shared app per se. It is really a
tool for creating a meeting session (a venue) with the right tools available
for the task being undertaken. The goal is to do this with the user having
little technical knowledge or input to the process.

We want to integrate that into AG 2 so that it populates a venue with the
appropriate set of services that are required to accomplish a specific task.
I think ideally it would be integrated into the venue client proper, but for
proof of concept we are looking at other mechanisms. Here is the scenario.

A user wants to create a meeting. He/she runs the ACE service. They are
asked a set of simple, non-technical questions. This identifies the type of
task they are trying to perform, including the services required to
accomplish the task and the parameter settings for each service (quality of
video, audio, and other shared app parameters). After completion, the ACE
service creates a venue on the server and populates it with the required
shared apps. It also populates the venue with parameter settings for each
shared app that the shared app uses on startup. Thus the "services" that
start are tied to the venue, including the quality level settings.

When a user enters the venue the services that are in the venue start up,
each of them using the parameter settings that are stored in the venue. Thus
the services are all configured as appropriate for the meeting taking place,
not based on the capability of the local node.

Our next prototype will probably have an ACE shared app that would do all of
this configuring and use shared apps as the services (that is we would not
use node services at all).

Some of the issues:

1) How do we create a venue on a server?
2) How do we add a shared app to a venue through the AGTK APIs?
3) What is the best way to store config information for a shared app in a
venue?
4) We need shared apps to start on venue entry. This was mentioned by others
at the AG retreat.
5) We need shared apps to read the config stuff on startup. Initially we can
do this as part of the shared app, but this would be a nice feature in
general for the future.
6) Shared apps don't know anything about nodes. Thus if we have a video
service as a shared app there is no way to get it to run on another machine
in a node. In this instance we would want to have a shared app that provides
a video/producer type of service check the node config and start up all of
the video/producers in the node. Thus we would like the shared apps to
negotiate with the node to determine how to deliver a specific service on a
specific node.

We talked about many of these things in Toronto, so I think this is
primarily a continuation of that discussion from our perspective.

What we want to get your help with is how best to build our next prototype.
We think the shared app approach is probable the easiest one to take at this
point... In return, we will fill your heads with our ideas and hope that
some of them will be useful 8-)

Cheers,

Brian





Andrew Patrick wrote:

> Just a reminder that we are meeting with Ivan Judson and some other 
> Argonne folks this afternoon (1:00 PDT, 3:00 CDT, 4:00 EDT). We will 
> be meeting in the ACE room of the Westgrid Venue Server.
> 
> Topics to be discussed:
> 
> - describing our vision of the ACE service
>   - each meeting space is customized for the task at hand, and the 
> capabilities of the nodes at the time of the session
> 
> - first prototypes built with Web interfaces ala AG 1
> 
> - would like to build the next interface inside AG 2
> 
> - what is the correct model for implementing within AG 2?
>   - we tried building a node service, but got into problems?
>   - building a shared application seems to work, but it would have to 
> restart the audio and video node services?
>   - aren't audio and video really just shared applications, so they 
> should be treated like the others?
> 
> Brian, can you build on this outline for the discussion?
> 
>