Why did I start Doblets

Mark Hooijkaas, $Revision: 1.1.1.1 $, $Date: 2000/10/12 02:15:32 $

Introduction

This document tries to describe as simple and truthfully as possible why I once felt the need for something I now call doblets. As Eric Raymond puts it, this document describes what problem "scratched my personal itch".

The itch

When I started using chat programs in 1996 I soon discovered all kinds of different but wonderful chat applications and environments:

PowWow: My first chat program, in which I discovered the magic of chatting online with someone you didn't know, but who was definitely a flesh-and-blood person and not a web-server program. It has always had a nice user Interface, a nice attitude, a nice user community and some pretty advanced features for that time (voice chat, whiteboard, chat-per-character).
Gaming Zone: This application/site was great for playing online card games, and i played many games of spades with people from all corners of this globe at the same time. After Microsoft bought this company, I never have been able to get it working again (and I am not a religious MS hater). Luckily Yahoo now provides a similar great service.
IRC: The granddaddy of all chat applications (except perhaps for talk). Not as fancy in some features as other applications maybe, but as real Unix philosophy, it provides a environment with many years of experience, in the protocols and user community. My main attraction to irc was/is the experienced user community and learning about etiquette, operators, visibility etc.
ICQ: Perhaps the best known chat program. Primarily designed for finding and keeping in-touch with online buddies.

Each of these programs had some features (or user community) that I particular liked. The problem was that they were all different programs. Different programs use different protocols, environments, servers, etc and this posed several problems:

Almost each chat application needed to be first installed on my computer (except for web-based java-applets). Although in theory installation can be very user friendly and even (almost) invisible (as java applet "installation" is), in practice I spent many hours locating the right software, downloading it, installing it (sometimes rebooting the computer), configuring it, before I could enter the chat/game/community I heard of a few hours before. If needed only once for each application it might just be bearable, but most chat applications had new releases every now and then that should be upgraded, making you do it all over again several times for many applications.
It was not possible to seemlessly integrate features from different chat applications. For example, I would have liked the more sophisticated chat features of pow-wow or icq (or even voice or video chat), when chatting with my card partners on gaming-zone or YahooGames. It is partially possible to accomplish this by continuously switching between the various applications, and using all of the applications by all chat partners. Although I have become pretty adept at application switching, it is very impractical and often impossible.
Last but not least: Each application / environment had it's own user community. On each community I had to "establish" a new identity (with a wide range of different features, e.g. home-page, email, photograph, avatar, face-icon, interests, etc.). More importantly, if I wanted to try to reach an online buddy, I often had to try many different applications before I found the one he was using at that moment. It was like trying 7 different phone companies every time you needed to call someone. I must admit that ICQ has improved this online presency detection a lot, by setting a de-facto standard for just this purpose, but the problem remains that you must still maintain/build new identities in new communities for each chat application.

The simplistic (=impossible) solution to these problems would be to have one chat application that had all the features, implemented in the best quality according to all perspectives, with all possible variants. In fact, I started trying many, many more chat applications (see appendix). This quest mainly proved to me that the problem of many, many chat applications, features, communities and identities was very real indeed. I did get much inspiration though for the more fundamental solution I had in mind.

The envisioned solution

The problem of the fragmented chat environments may be solved by providing one standardised environment, on which new or better chat applications or features could easily be developed and deployed. I envisioned a distributed object (for which I later coined the term doblet), which users could easily add to their chat-application, thus extending the functionality. In simple terms the working of a doblet is a follows:

Somewhere a new doblet would be created (either in a personal chat-application or on a dedicated doblet-server).
A user would see the new doblet and request a connection with it.
The users chat-application would download the GUI part of this doblet and run it, providing a nice user interface (i.e. giving th

I envision users handling these distributed object as easy as other (computer based) objects. Users will be able to drag and drop new objects in their workspace / chatroom / browser. Other users will be able to connect to such object (or the objects will even pop-up, when added to an existing "room"), and interact with such objects with an simple GUI. It shouldn't matter if such objects are new to the user, the system would just download the necessary code, when neeeded.

The term doblet cam from the observation that such a Distributed OBject was truly distributed in the sense that the object itself was distributed over multiple computers, especially that each workstation had it's own (graphical) user-interface part of the object, next to one-or-more server parts. This is a different perception (although technically the difference isn't that clear-cut), than the common view on distributed objects (e.g. CORBA, DCOM and RMI), where the objects/components aren't distributed over many computers, but only accessable remotely from other computers while being located on just one computer.

Appendix: Other Chat programs I tried

Yahoo Games
netmeeting
The palace
icuii
cuseeme
jabber
various 3D avatar worlds
many simple, (often java-based) small chat environments, web-based or stand-alone
klaverjas