Simple description of libepc
Seems I failed to give a simple description of libepc. People still ask what it really is.
Well, its nothing fancy. It's really just a public hash table.
- plus encryption
- plus authentication
- plus discovery
Sounds trivial to implement, but isn't.
At least the discovery part: Current DNS-SD APIs provide a robust state monitoring API, and evilly also expect you to use it - were you just want a simple publish and forget API.
The easy to use hash table on top of HTTPS (server-side, client-side) really isn't that hard to do. Mainly an API design challenge. HTTPS - instead of D-Bus or XMPP or plain TCP/IP or whatever holy gral - was choosen for purly pragmatical reasons: Libsoup is a reasonable platform library, providing many of the features we wanted (encryption and authentication).
You believe libepc should use another transport mechanism or have other ideas? Well, I am writing about libepc to get feedback. One interesting point came from Havoc Pennington: He seems to believe this public hash table service should be shared by the entire desktop session, instead of setting up hash tables for every application.
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