Nolan's question of the day: distributed servers?

[Lyn A Headley]

>>>>> "Nolan" == Nolan Darilek <nolan at ethereal.dhis.org> writes:

    Nolan> I've kept up a good tradition (Maybe not, depending on your
    Nolan> point of view :) of asking one question per day. Here's
    Nolan> today's. :)

whew!  this one's a doozy.

    Nolan> So, a network of namespaces will exist, each accessing
    Nolan> either a database or a server. My current concern, though,

So do I get this right?  A main architectural goal for your mud server
framework will be to allow servers access to objects on other servers,
along with a protocol for discovering and invoking services offered by
those objects.  

The hairy part (as you've mentioned below) is where do the _effects_
of those services take place?  If you are hoping to invoke an object
on one server and have it change the state of another server, good luck.
That sounds pretty tough to me.  They will need to share knowledge
about the state of each other in a very intimate way, which would be
especially hard if the servers have different coders.

I do believe corba will do what you want (not that I've DONE it or
anything ;-) They call it dynamic method invocation or something
equally obvious (also look at interface repositories).

However, if you're serious about this I'd advise you to look at Erlang.

www.erlang.org

-- 
Lyn Headley
remove the word "bogus" from my address for the real one.