Re: [Mldonkey-users] Gui Protocol Question [2]

[Petter E. Stokke]

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 23:38, Mathias wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> is it possible that the mldonkey-gui-protocol is some 
> kind of chaos-protocol?
> 
> i mean something like:
> 
> core tells us 1000 of things, and the gui has to react on
> each message from the core?
> 
> i cant image that it talks with a protocol like 
> 
> while (connected) {
>   ask question to core 
>   get answer from core
> }
> 
> is that true?

Pretty much. The GUI protocol is just that - it's designed for use with
an external GUI. It's not a utility protocol. In essence, it works a lot
like the IRC protocol - you send commands to it, you get a lot of data
from it, but there's not really any way of matching data you receive to
commands you send. Usually a command produces a result, but the result
isn't easily recognisable as such, and especially there's no guarantee
it will be the first packet you receive after sending the command
packet. The user, however, usually notices that the expected effect
occurs (or fails to) after issuing a command.

This works pretty well for the purpose it was intended - implementing a
real-time external GUI (or a simple status display, using the poll
extension) - but not for much else. If you want a command/response based
protocol, I'm afraid you're stuck with the telnet interface, or the HTTP
interface.

-- 
Petter E. Stokke <address@hidden> http://www.gibreel.net/
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