What is Phantom?
Phantom is a loosely-coupled set of servers and communications protocols designed to supercede SPIRIT. The goal is not to produce a commercial/finalised offering but rather to deliberately leave things open-ended in order to facilitate research. To this end, the design philosophy is such that you should be able to use phantom proided you have can use unicast and multicast on your network and machine. That is the only requirement: no client side libraries are required (although some may be produced). This allows embedded devices access to everything so integrating, say, an iPaq, should be very easy. Persistent storage is through a postgres database which is attached to a server that, initially, executes SQL commands on belhalf of a client and returns the results (thereby allowing clients to execute SQL without needing any libraries). Users can access the database and change contents directly: all changes are multicast to a particular channel using database triggers.
