Evolution of software moves in mysterious ways. Especially if you're not the one contemplating it, but the one making it happen. Hindsight is always 20/20, and now that I'm looking back at the way DZ evolved, I'm seeing that I was merely trodding the same path as countless others - namely, coming all the way from monolithic single host software design to modular distributed.
Just as dinosaurs became extinct, DZ ceased to be a monolith even before it become public - the first GPL'd version was already split in several parts able to talk to each other via TCP/IP, and the parts were linked together in a modular container driven architecture.
Further down the road, the project started shedding more pieces as better versions of them arrived elsewhere (scheduler would be one example). It also became clear that as computers become smaller and cheaper, the day will come when it would be not only possible, but beneficial to utilize multiple computers for a task that could be perfectly done by just one - just for the very reason of having a particular computer in a convenient place for connecting hardware.
Most prominent examples would be -
- An HTPC which has to reside in a rigidly defined place, next to the rest of AV equipment;
- A wireless router that is a focal point of wireless and Ethernet connectivity;
- A workstation, which by itself provides several relevant data streams (CPU temperature, motherboard temperature, hard drive temperature).
Stay tuned.
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