Hi John:

becuase your project is very OS related, you don't have to do
the last OS assignment if you would like to have more time for this project.

Your project looks big. Is the format of your messages XML?
Do you plan to use xmlfor4 from IBM?

See
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/demeter/related-work/xml/jw-09-xmlmessage.html
for a messaging service. Is there a connection?

Johan Ovlinger is your host.

-- Karl

From john.sung@compaq.com Mon Nov  8 08:59:10 1999
Hi, Professor.

This is my abstract on the project I'll be doing for this quarter for
COM3360.


Quick Messaging Service

This will be an implementation of an instant messaging ssystem using
Demeter/Java. This will be similar to AOL Instant Messanger and Yahoo!
Pager. The implementation will be a server/client architecture with servers
being able to be distributed over the internet. It should also, be able to
recover from failures, where 1 server will fail at a time. 

The implementation of the system will be a distributed Primary-Backup
Fault-Tolerant System where each node in the system is the Primary Server to
all of the clients that are connected to it and rest of the servers will be
it's backups. This way, you can distribute the load of the clients among
different servers where as in ordinary Primary-Backup system, the one and
only primary becomes the bottleneck in performance. 

The client program will be a simple user interface that allows the user to
send and recieve messages. The user should be able to enter in the
destination of the message and the message body. Then the client should send
the message to the server, which then relays the message to the destination
client. When a message is received from another user, the client should
display that message with the author's information. 

The main functionality of the server is to keep track of all of the clients
that have connected to it and deliver messages to and from those
clients.This is the simple 1 server case. The case where there are more than
1 clients, each of the server will keep track of all of the servers that are
alive in the system and their clients. If a server fails and other servers
detect it, the clients of the failed server will be notified and will be
prompted to connect to a new server in the system.

I believe that grading should be done on 2 main features. First is the main
functionality of transporting messages through the system. Second is the
ability to recover from a failure.
    

---------------------------------------------
John Sung                   
Compaq Computer Corp.       
Alpha Development Group      
508-841-2309
john.sung@compaq.com