[Verse-dev] Verse and HPVM

[Emil Brink]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005 12:54:42 -0600
"Baldridge, Timothy" <tbaldridge at alertacademy.com> wrote:

Hi Timothy.

> I'm the project manager for HPVM (http://hpvm.sourceforge.net). My
> project could greatly benefit from the Verse library. However, there
> are a few questions I do have.

Sure, fire away! From taking a quick look at your web, it's not entierly
obvious that Verse fits your needs at all, to be honest. Perhaps you
could expand a bit on what use you see for it?

> (1) Does Verse have a way to convert from little to big endian
> machines? In other words if the server is running on a Mac and the
> clients on Win32 machines, will they all co-exist peacefuly?

Absolutely. Verse's network transport layer encodes everything in a
known byte order (big-endian, to be specific) and then decodes it
on the receiving machine to the native order.

> (2) Is there a way to keep blocks of raw data on the Verse Server? If
> not how hard would it be to add one. Verse currently is a little too
> graphics oriented for my needs. I had thought of doing a fork, but if we
> could add a memory block object, that would take care of many issues,
> and give my project a big boost. 

Well... Traditionally we (or rather Eskil, who is the inventor of the
protocol and its main designer) are rather conservative. The protocol
is designed for 3D graphics and "VR-like" applications, and more or less
assumes that is what it's going to be used for primarily.

That said, there is the "tags" system, have you read about it? Basic-
ally tags are named values that can be collected into groups and
attached to any node in Verse. For storing large amounts of data, there
is a "blob" (binary large object) tag type, which basically stores raw
bits. It is limited in size though, and because it is raw, Verse cannot
do any endian-conversions on the data held therein.

There's also the text node which is great for sharing anything that
can be encoded as text, but for large amounts of binary-ish data
that tends to be a bit costly due to the overhead.

> Anyway, any help would be great!

Perhaps you can shed some more light on what your interests in the
Verse protocol are?

Regards,

/Emil