Re: Engaging apps folks

[Erik Nordmark <Erik.Nordmark@sun.com>]

> A network application developer actually only wants this:
> 8<---------
> char uri[] = "tcp://hostname:service";
> sock = uriconnect(uri);
> -------->8
> 
> A function similar like that should be abstracted by the networking
> API's. getaddrinfo() requires a loop, weird cases etc, which you have to
> duplicate in every application. The above would simply work(tm) and
> doesn't require the application developer to worry about anything
> networkish. The socket now presented by the API is for the application
> the identifier and the only thing the API (or most probably the kernel)
> would now have to do is make bloody sure that it keeps working, even if
> it has to change underlying addresses etc. uriconnect() can abstract all
> of that, the socket(), getaddrinfo() loop and the connect() call.

The above is easy and with slight variations exist in different
higher level abstractions to access the network. I don't know if
all those abstractions do the retry loop though.

But that doesn't address UDP, which would require a different structure of the
API because only the application knows when to retry (e.g., based on the 
application layer not getting a response). Hence the retry can't be hidden
under the API for UDP.

  Erik