The Hiitch platform consists of three basic software components. These components are aggregated together on the desktop to produce a seamless real time social networking system. In due time more components may be added to provide richer functionality and online services but we will just focus on these three components for now.

Hiitch Server
The server is the most critical component of the entire platform. It manages all the critical information and the security of the platform. The Hiitch server is a very advanced piece of software. It understands complex instructions and allow the clients to interact with it through pure XML. It was designed to function very much like our human brain. At the core, it is preloaded by a set of generic instructions that are common to many online services provided by web servers. However, it is far more advanced than today’s web servers in the way it processes and understands information. A typical interaction with the server starts with the client communicating a set of XML instructions to the server. The server then processes the client’s XML request and resolves them into a combination of runtime instructions. These instructions are then aggregated to perform a complex operation. The server will also determine at this point if the requesting client is part of the system and is authorized to carry out those operations. If all is well, it executes and processes the request and returns any results. Each interaction between the server and the client are done on a dedicated pool of threads that provides the parallel processing nature of the server. Depending on your hardware, you can decide on how you want to scale the server to meet your number crunching needs by tuning the threading model. You can also easily customize the server’s runtime behavior and operations by adjusting the instruction set that it is preloaded with. We will discuss more about the details of the server on another post.

Hiitch IM Server
Hiitch was never meant to be an instant messaging (IM) system. IM in Hiitch is just another feature that we provided as a means of communication and not its defining characteristic. Hiitch is a social networking platform which has IM facilities among many others and not the other way around. With that said, the IM facilities in Hiitch is very much a peer to peer (P2P) system. The IM facilities should be more accurately called a routing facility than a chat server. The reason for this is that, the IM server does nothing more than route the interaction between both clients to each other. It does no processing except to work with the Hiitch server to determine if the clients are authorized to use the system and to notify both parties of any incoming initiation for interactions. There is a need for this routing facility because many networks are not designed or configured to work with a P2P system. The IM facilities on Hiitch is still very much a work in progress and you will see more of it in later stages of our development.

External Services
External services are not connected to the Hiitch server in any way. Client developers are free and encouraged to implement facilities and features of their own through this avenue. Although external services are not considered part of the Hiitch platform, but it is still part of the social interaction process that the user is experiencing on their desktop. We have implemented two examples on the client that we thought was useful. The first one is the delivery of interesting events as an autosuggestion to the user based on his/her location and profile. The second is the real time updating of the user’s shout message and default picture to our web widget that can be found on our blog. Developers desiring to extend this portion of the Hiitch platform do not need to understand how the Hiitch system functions but are still able to integrate their software into our social networking experience.

You can read more about Hiitch’s Network Connectivity Overview here.

I hope that this article will get you excited about developing with and on the Hiitch platform. You are encouraged to sign up an account with our default network and use it as a means to contact us or interact with other developers of the Hiitch platform. Just download the default client and join us today as part of our community!

Tags: artificial intelligence, Features, networking system, parallel processing, peer to peer, server tunning, social networking, software components, Tips and Tricks, web servers, web services

Filed under: Tips and Tricks, Features by geek |

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 1st, 2007 @ 10:55 pm on the category Tips and Tricks, Features .
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