Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Federation is tested at WaveSandbox.com


Federation is about how do you get multiple Wave servers to share and synchronise content. Conceptually, it is one of the aspects that makes Wave relevant. With federation and it being Open Source, it means that we will be able to have our own Wave servers and just like with e-mail we decide what we share.

In his post to the wave-protocol group, Dan Petersen announced that experimenting with federation can now start. At this stage it is only for developers and as I understand from Tom, it is still pretty rocky; the code does not want to compile on our box.

For the MediaWikiWave project it is important that we will have our own server because in this use case Wave is connected to a MediaWiki publishing back end. Changes may originate on another Wave server, but ultimately the robot will only run on the local server.

The one question I have about the federation protocol is how Wave will recover for the other servers when the server who originated a wave crashes beyond repair.
Thanks,
       GerardM

4 comments:

  1. They say there's only one copy of a message, but actually there's a copy on each Wave server. If one person's server crashes, everybody else should still be Waving and they should see the changes when they get back. Only one person needs to still be in a Wave for it to survive.

    Or at least, this is the impression I get from the technology videos. I'm not in Wave yet myself. They say, "there's only one copy of the message" but what they mean is that there's only one copy per Wave provider/server.

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  2. The question is how will the protocol deal with the situation when the principal server dies. When this means that the others are no longer able to communicate, there is a problem. I hope to learn that there is no problem. At this time I am not convinced
    Thanks,
    GerardM

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think wave data is copied too all pertisipents servers and synchronize wave date in real-time, it sould be still alive. Ofcorse pertisipents from dead server won't be anable to pertisipeit in wave anymore. Ask this quastion in Wave protocol news group ;]

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  4. I asked the question at the meeting in Amsterdam. As I understand it, the originating server maintains the conversation and there is nothing in the protocol to transfer this role.
    Thanks,
    GerardM

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