[boost] Re: async socket i/o [long]

From: Boris (boris_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-04-17 11:08:24

Michel André wrote:
> [...] It's all in a name ;) . Then I don't think they should be called
> connector and acceptor in level 0 since I was associating it to the
> patterns in POSA2 which I guess a lot of people are familiar with. And
> if we are going to implement these in level 1 it might be confusing to
> have the names with a different implementation in level0. I also think
> there are a lot of good ideas to use from POSA2 and ACE.

Agreed. In the beginning acceptor and connector in 
http://www.highscore.de/boost/net/basic.png were called server and client 
until someone complained. Now I also like acceptor/connector better than 
server/client but if they remind developers of the acceptor-connector 
pattern that's no good. However I don't know any better name in the moment - 
if you have an idea please tell me. :)

However I took over your ideas about ACE and updated the package diagram at 
http://www.highscore.de/boost/net/packages.png. If we forget about the two 
yellow packages for a moment:
* The red package belongs to level 0. I changed the name and now call it 
berkeley to emphasize that this package contains a C++ API of what is known 
to many programmers as Berkeley sockets. The idea of this package is that 
network developers who glance at the C++ network library recognize many 
concepts and switch over. They should look at the documentation, see a class 
socket and think: "I know everything about sockets - I can use these classes 
immediately."
* The blue packages belong to level 1. I introduced a new package called ace 
because of the acceptor-connector pattern which is used in ACE. This package 
is for network programmers who look at the documentation, see 
application-level concepts and think: "I can connect my application to the 
network without understanding sockets."
* The other blue package called iostream is for network programmers who know 
std::iostream and would like to use something similar for synchronous I/O on 
the network. As someone proposed it would be nice to implement a streambuf 
class for network operations.

The package names were made up on the spot - there are probably better ones. 
The design however comes close to what we had already in the Wiki (see 
http://www.crystalclearsoftware.com/cgi-bin/boost_wiki/wiki.pl?BoostSocket): 
There are two levels described - one as a wrapper for the C API (the 
berkeley package), the other one for connector, acceptor and data connection 
(our ace package). BoostSocket/Streams is the iostream package in the 
diagram. The multiplexing library I once proposed myself is one of the four 
supported I/O models which can be used in level 0 (there must be something 
similar to select()) and in level 1 (if we follow ACE there will be 
something like the Reactor class).

Any comments? I'd be happy to hear some ideas which might be missing in the 
big picture.

Boris