ANN: Kamaelia 0.2.0 released!

[phil hunt]

Kamaelia seems it might be an interesting project. However, I don't 
think the project is well served by this announcement -- which I 
find vague and hard to understand. Which is a shame, because it 
means that other people probably don't understand it very well 
either, which means less people will use it.

In a spirit of constructive criticism I'd like to give some detailed 
comments about this...


On Mon, 01 Aug 2005 19:50:11 +0200, Michael Sparks <michaels at rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
>
>Kamaelia is a collection of Axon components designed for network
>protocol experimentation in a single threaded, select based environment.
>Axon components are python generators are augmented by inbox and outbox
>queues (lists) for communication in a communicating sequential processes
>(CSP) like fashion.

I really have very little idea what this means.

>The architecture is specifically designed to try and simplify the
>process of designing and experimenting with new network protocols in
>real environments. 

The information I can guess out of this is: "Kamaelia is a library 
for creating network protocols that sit on top of tcp and/or udp". 
Given that it's a BBC project, I imagine we're talking about 
protocols for transferring large amount of data, e.g. sound or 
motion pictures.

>More background on the motivations behind Kamaelia
>can be found here: http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Challenges/

There's something interesting here:

  In Building Public Value, the BBC has committed to the delivery of 
  BBC content to the British Public over this multitude of systems, 
  in a way that is enjoyable, accessible and **repurposable** by the 
  British Public in the way they choose.

(my emphasis)

This is a laudable aim, but if the BBC want to do this, the first 
step they could make is to open up their content under a Creative 
Commons licence. They could start with their news, current affairs 
and documentaries. They could also do this with music downloads: for 
example a few weeks ago they made available for free download 
all of Beethoven's symphonies, performed by the BBC Orchestra. But the
download only staryed up for a week, and they didn't put the files 
under a CC license, so they could be redistributed. Why not? It 
would have cost them no more to do so than what they did, and 
would've provided better value for downloaders and music lovers.

Of course, the music industry would've complained, but they did
anyway. Frankly, fuck them. Their business model is obsolete, and
they should either get a new one or crawl into a corner and die.

BTW, the html is broken in that it's very poorly written, doedsn't
use CSS, and some of the stuff that is intended to display in a
monospaced font doesn't.  For example, this HTML code from 
<http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Docs/Axon.html>:


  <div><span style="font-family:Courier 10 
  Pitch;font-weight:600">def</span><span style="font-family:Courier 
  10 Pitch"> main(self):</span></div>
  <ul type="disc"><div><span style="font-family:Courier 10 
  Pitch;font-weight:600">yield</span><span 
  style="font-family:Courier 10 Pitch"> 1<br /></span><span 
  style="font-family:Courier 10 Pitch;font-weight:600">while</span>
  <span style="font-family:Courier 10 Pitch">(self.i):</span></div>

could be better written as:

  <pre>
     def main(self):
        yield 1
        while (self.i):
  </pre>

Much, much simpler, and actually works.

>General feedback is welcome either directly, mailing lists or via the
>project weblog which is here:
>    * http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/blog/blog.cgi

I guess the main question that needs to be answered is "Why would I, 
as a programmer, use Kamaelia?"


-- 
Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk