A linux.conf.au wrapup

Posted May 1, 2005 8:53 UTC (Sun) by ab (subscriber, #788) [Link]

Composite functions is a way in Samba 4 to basically construct your application's logic out of lego blocks: i.e., instead of doing everything by yourself, you just call a composite function for logon, then for reading file, then you process that file. Behind the scenes, logon composite function does a number of calls (all asynchronosly), establish SMB session, authenticates, etc. The read file composite function actually connects to the tree, opens a file, reads its content into a memory.

All this is seen as a few-liner but internally it is quite a big execution list for SMB and user is actually free of taking care of the steps she doesn't really implementing.

Composite functions are built on top of Samba4's asynchronous infrastructure, hierarchical allocation (talloc) and what is usually known as continuations -- async functions which are called when particular stage of processing is done so that state machine describing a composite function logic is making a change in its state.