[zeromq-dev] GSoC ideas inquiry

[Yin Qiu]

Hi,

I am a CS master student from China, and got interested in some of your listed Summer of Code ideas.

First I have to admit that I am new to 0MQ with only a little MQ knowledge, but I do have experience in  network programming through several projects. I enjoy playing with networked systems. I had one prior GSoC experience by successfully implementing a task scheduler for a cluster computing framework.

I just checked out the code on github, and took a quick look at the guide to see the big picture. Then I got back to the GSoC ideas, and would like to implement the following two ideas:

1) 0MQ Ports
Is this idea suggesting, when the tcp transport is used, we support creating an endpoint that is able to multiplex incoming connections? For example, after doing zmq_bind(sock, "tcp://*:5555"), we can subsequently zmq_connect to "tcp://server_address:5555:1", "tcp://server_address:5555:2", etc. (actual syntax yet to be defined), the trailing section after the last colon indicating the virtual sub-port that the peer wants to connect?

If my understanding is correct, I think the fundamental change should be to maintain separate queues for sub-ports, and to modify the way the decoder handles incoming tcp data so that it can direct the incoming message to the right channel. Please fill with more details here for me as I am not yet familiar with 0MQ internals.

2) Certified sockets
I love this idea because I like extremely robust designs :-) Unfortunately, I don't have much clue about it. Could you give a specific example about this? Besides, is there any restriction on the type of the underlying transport if we try to implement certified sockets?

So basically I want to know more details about these two ideas so that I can estimate the scope and the size of the projects. By the way, will a summer project consist of a single idea or several ones? If it is the former case, I shall pick one from the two.

Any comments are greatly appreciated.

--
Yin Qiu
Nanjing University, China