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CAKE has reached a small milestone
Mar. 28th, 2011 08:25 amCAKE reached a new milestone early this morning. It now successfully both generates and parses messages that use the new protocol. It also successfully detected a re-used session id. I also think the code that does this is also a lot better designed than the old code was. It's easier to see how to put it in the context of a larger system that implements a node that speaks the protocol
It's also much more extensively tested at a deeper level with tests that are designed to document the inner workings of the system.
Overall, it's in a much better state than I left it when I sort of stopped working on it much in 2004. And I'm going to handle the hard problems first, how to maintain the relationship between sessions and transports, and having two way realtime conversations between nodes. This rather than concentrating on the messages that will be traded back and forth at a higher level (which will be done using protobuf). That can come later, especially since I'm not likely to get it right the first time anyway.
I also need to think about getting nodes to participate in a DHT to share assertions (like how to reach a particular node) in a distributed way.
Lastly, the protocol has something of a problem with 'liveness' because I designed it with the idea of conversations being able to be initiated without any round trips. There are some mitigation for this problem in session ids, but that mitigation is somewhat problematic because it requires the recipient of a conversation initiation to keep track of some stuff for everybody who tries to talk to it.
I'm not really sure how to handle the 'liveness' problem though and still preserve the lack of round trips property. I could require that session ids contain an 'hour number' or something similar. Though that introduces a requirement for at least very coarse grain time synchronization for all nodes.
