[AG-TECH] AG Toolkit Developers' Sessions

[Allan Spale]

Hello,

One of the projects that I am currently working on at EVL is to get an
application working as a service with AGTk.  However, being that
documentation is available but still sparse, I am having some difficulty
making any breakthrough progress.  I was corresponding with someone else
on this and they seem to be in the same situation.

I would like to propose regularly scheduled AGTk developers' sessions that
would help get the entire AG development community working together so
that we can all get our services and shared applications integrated with
our shared collective knowledge and help.  At this point, I am not
volunteering to coordinate and host this event; it could be informal to
start with and build up more formally as momentum builds within the AG
development community.  

Right now to start, we could just start out with roundtable discussions
that would involve what people have accomplished so far and giving advice
to other people who might be stuck in some aspect of development.  For
example, I can make a service and point to the location of the executable
but it does not start, ever.  I do notice that because I am currently
constrained (or so I may think) to using a video type, I get a window
during the configuration of my service which asks if I want to use my
video driver DLL as a resource.  I do not know how that comes about (need
to dig through more code), but maybe somebody out there knows the answer
to this and whether I can create my own type and role (without it being
hard-coded somewhere).  Plus, if I wanted to have configuration files for
this service available for people to download (such as 3-D models), how
can I get them to associate with the executable for the service.  Do I
register a MIME type somewhere?  This is basically my motivation for
wanting to have these sessions.

As we become more advanced, we could have people schedule presentations on
different topics and even coordinate ways to contribute development
documents for the Access Grid Documentation Project (AGDP) on various
topics.

Concerning scheduling, I have three days each week where I could probably
meet.  For instance, we could meet Tuesday mornings at 11 AM CDT or
Wednesday afternoons at 2 PM CDT.  If there are people interested in these
sessions outside of the USA, we could even schedule other different
sessions.  One nice thing to have available for these sessions would be a
whiteboard service (WBD).  Maybe that could be our first group project we
could work on.  WBD
(http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/multimedia/software/wbd/) is from the suite
of VIC and RAT and supports multicast.  Perhaps we could figure out a way
to make this work in AG 2 and use our experience from making this service
for doing our own projects.

The AG will only be as good as the services and applications which utilize
it, so the easier the process of development becomes, the more services
and applications will be available and raise the value of the AG.  I
invite everyone who is considering AG development or is trying to work on
developing for the AG to consider attending these sessions.  As far as
responding to this message, let's try to find some time which would work
for a good number of people.  Perhaps we could even record the sessions
using Voyager so that if people cannot attend live and in person, they can
watch a replay at their convenience.

Thanks for your time and consideration.


Allan Spale
EVL at UIC
Research Assistant