As implemented through r53, a snow dots system
running with severMode active has primary contol of
flow and may initiate transactions to request behaviors
or data from another snow dots instance.
A machine running with clientMode active waits for
transactions and executes behaviors or returns data,
as requested.
Thus, in terms of initiating transactions vs. providing
services, the uses of "client" and "server" are anti-
sensible. The client should be the initiator and the
server should be the provider.
The intuition for the current usage probably comes
from the notion of a web server as being bigger and
more complicated than a web client. So by some
vague notion of bigness, the current usage is
somewhat sensible--the "server" does more.
It will be possible for one snow dots system, currently
called the server, to request behaviors and data from
multiple other systems. In this case, the one-server-
to-many-clients relationship would also resemble a
web server and clients.
But the basic semantics of client and service provider
are probably the most important consideration. This
seems to be the usual interpretation of the client-
server model:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-server
As of r53, not too many snow dots components use
the terms "client" and "server", so it should be feasible
to swap them or replace them with other language.
Original issue reported on code.google.com by Benjamin.Heasly on 27 Feb 2010 at 8:41
Original issue reported on code.google.com by
Benjamin.Heasly
on 27 Feb 2010 at 8:41