KOSH - LENTIL (a pulse is better than a bean ;-)

Logical ENTity Interaction Language

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KOSH takes independent, autonomous, black box entities and places them into a cybersea where they are able to interact with each other. This interaction is achieved through the public and privileged faces that the entities display. Since this is an abstraction, to fully take advantage of it requires an abstraction, in this case an abstract, language and platform independent logical language. This language allows for the specification or description of an entity without imposing any view as to the implementation of the entity. Those familiar with CORBA will recognise the same mission and know that IDL (Interface Definition Language) is its tool of choice. However, KOSH is a more organic, more ecological beast, and it requires something more than IDL.

LENTIL aims to give KOSH users, developers and designers a single, easily understandable tool with which to describe an entity. It is designed to be as open, portable and simple as possible. In keeping with this, it will be written in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Do not fear - this is simply a tagging meta language. If you understand basic HTML, then you will understand XML. It gives clarity and choice, clarity because you can read it from an ASCII file, and choice because you can edit it anyway you like, from a text editor to a custom built design tool.

Having looked back over the DTD, I cannot emphasis this strongly enough. The DTD is like looking into the guts of your washing machine. If you enjoy doing that, then working with the DTD and a text editor is for you. However, for the less "challenged", a design tool will make sure you never see a single tag. It will have options to see the different parts of the entity, to pull parts in from a parts store, to cross reference and validate without ever having to get your hands dirty. It is a tool, nothing more. The task is the most important, describing the entity itself.

For the developer, designer and architect, LENTIL provides the ability to quickly define an entity, prototype the entity, describe it, and provides a portable product for any tool chain, feeding into language specific stub generators. For users, LENTIL provides the basis for KOSH's rich promotion, advertisment and interaction features.