4 May
2011
4 May
'11
3:38 p.m.
On Tue, May 03, 2011 at 10:00:16PM -0400, Paul Davis wrote:
On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 8:17 PM, Lieven Moors
<lievenmoors(a)gmail.com> wrote:
[ ... ]
one warning: as you get deeper into this, you are going to run into
one of the more unfortunate aspects of OSC: it is really deeply
unsuited for use as a 2-way protocol.
That is: it works very nicely when you have a controller that wants to
send a message to a receiver, without expecting a reply. It works very
nicely when you have an "engine" that wants to distribute information
on its state to someone who is listening for such changes.
But it really starts to break down if you use it for the "send a
message and get a reply". Its not that it breaks down in a deep and
fundamental way, more that it becomes unreliable and requires another
entire almost-a-protocol-itself layer on top of OSC to ensure that you
actually collect the replies etc. etc. It gets even more complex if
the ordering is important.
Hi, Paul
An important remarque...
I would like to understand better why this is the case.
I guess the fundamental reason would be that UDP is an
unsafe protocol, because it doesn't perform checks on the
data sent or received. But would't that make it equally unsafe
in both directions? Isn't this just two osc servers that are
sending messages towards each other?
I would expect to be reasonably sure that the reply makes it
from one server to another, just as any other messages would.
Wouldn't OSC or liblo be totally broken anyway if I couldn't
rely on this sufficiently?
I understand what you say, as far as it concerns the ordering
of messages, and the convenience of using OSC for this kind of
communication, but I'm not sure I understand the rest.
greetings,
lieven