Visibility of Underlying Resources
How to deal with different computers, operating systems, networks.
- Differences should be transparent to achieve portability.
- What about use of special-purpose resources (parallel machines, multimedia workstations, ...)
Likewise, underlying network should not be entirely hidden.
- Why not make applications/framework resource aware?
Example: multicast service for shared whiteboard vs. video multicast
- reliable vs. non-reliable
- small multicast group vs. large group
- many-to-many vs. one-to-many
Provide simple service, with easy-to-configure extensions.