[rucksack-devel] transactions and distributed objects

[Arthur Lemmens]

[I should be doing real work, but this is too much fun...]

I've been thinking about our discussion about transactions this
week.  In a sense, the current implementation of Rucksack contains
an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of
half of the NAMOS system by David Reed.  (See section 7.12.4 ("Time
Domain Addressing") of the "Transaction Processing" book by Gray and
Reuter, and Reed's original thesis at
http://www.lcs.mit.edu/publications/specpub.php?id=773.)

So maybe it's a good idea to go all the way from the start.  I've
just started reading Reed's thesis (highly recommended, by the way;
an interesting detail from his bio is that he was involved with the
implementation of MACLISP), so it's not very clear to me yet what
the implementation strategy should be.

The two big advantages would be that Rucksack would get complete
isolation (instead of just protection from 'lost updates') and that
it would be possible to have distributed rucksacks.  Disadvantages
are that it's probably slower and that the implementation may be
more complicated.  But that may be worth it in the long run.

I'd be interested in your opinions about this.

Arthur