Sierra
An OpenPrivacy Reputation Management Framework

Communications

An RMF needs to support multiple topologies/protocols because a Sierra based application may want to exchange or receive Reputation objects via putReputation from any number of hosts.

Since the core of Sierra is based around an RCE, Sierra can provide support for any new communications topology/protocol just by writing a new RCE which acts as a bridge. A bridge RCE is similar to a normal RCE but does not contain any calculation logic, it only contains network communications logic and forwards all of its calculations onto a remote RCE.

Essentially this allows any RMF to support any current and future protocol just by writing a small Component.

Future Directions:

• Support multiple communications protocols including SOAP/XMLRPC/RMI. This will probably be integrated into Talon so that all components support remoting.
• Support lookup mechanisms such as UDDI (which is somewhat centralized) or metatracking (which is somewhat distributed) so that we can find other RMF instances at runtime.

Components:

    CommunicationsRCE:

    A CommunicationsRCE is a tag component which extends the RCE component. 
    
    It basically performs the same role that an RCE does except that it forwards
    all operations (getReputation, putReputation, etc) to a remote RMF/Sierra
    installation.  This is done by wrapping an existing RCE with any logic
    necessary to communicate with a remote machine.

    This architecture means we can support any protocol, any topology and any
    future protocols/topologies that do not exist yet.  This is due to the fact
    that a CommunciationsRCE has almost *no* requirements and offloads most of
    its burden to the implementation class.  This, in essence, will allow Sierra
    to support almost infinite growth without rewriting any existing code that
    uses it.

    Example:

       /   SOAP-RCE    \                                    /   SOAP-RCE    \
      |                 |               ( IP )             |                 |
      |   [Local-RCE]   |  <--- Network ( Gnutella ) --->  |   [Remote-RCE]  |
      |                 |               ( Freenet )        |                 |
       \   SOAP-RCE    /                                    \   SOAP-RCE    /

    

Sierra has additional documentation for this package.