The Initiating Goal

The initial motivation behind the conception of TAS was admissibly both one of curiosity as well as, ashamedly, arrogance and pride. The foremost being the most fundamental of engineering antidotes: I wonder how that works? The latter coming from working on various failed products that utilized not so completely baked 3rd party products that always leave the ambitious developer both frustrated and thinking: geez I can build one of those if I were only given the opportunity.

Goal:

Facilitate an understanding of client server related issues and concepts through the experience gained in implementing a network based client-server infrastructure.

Current Motivations

At present the current goal, now that the software exists, is one of: now that you have it, what do you do with it? This, fortunately, is not a tremendously hard one to answer. Solid Rock's long term interest has been in both software and biological systems. Combining the two leads directly to software simulation of the biological world. Of initial curiosity is the traditional ¨game of life¨ as well as other similar population dynamics problems.

As a side note, our current interest in continuing development of TAS is the belief that there exists very mature middle-where technologies. However since such technologies tend to be both stateless, such as in the www based http protocols and related infrastructures, or statefull, such as in CORBA, EJB, Web Services based RPC request/response based paradimes, no existing technologies are optimal for an event based and network bandwidth intensive application such as a real time simulation.

Goal:

Provide infrastructural support for multi-client, distributed, client-server based simulation software.