Designing socket messaging format

[Manoj Plakal]

Paul Rubin wrote:

> Manoj Plakal <terabaap at yumpee.org> writes:
>>             I'm not trying to reinvent a new network
>>             protocol here. All I'm asking is if there's
>>             some kind of cross-platform ultra-lightweight
>>             COM/CORBA-kind of messaging system, built on top
>>             of some IPC mechanism (UDP or domain sockets or named
>>             pipes or something not too heavy).
>>
> 
> Did Pyro already come up in this discussion?  http://pyro.sourceforge.net.


          Pyro looks nice, but it's Python-only. I'd
          prefer something that has multiple language
          bindings. Also, it's in the same domain
          as CORBA: distributed computing. There must
          be a stripped-down subset that works better
          for simple message-passing between apps running
          the same machine. In a portable manner.

          Right now, there are some reasonable
          systems on different platforms:

             - Win32: COM/OLE/ActiveX

             - MacOS: AppleScript events

             - KDE: DCOP, this has a nice feature-set, it's
               lightweight and I'd really like to see a
               cross-platform version of this. Right now, it's
               tied to Qt (notification is done via the Qt event loop).

             - Gnome: CORBA using ORBit

             - Generic: XML-RPC, ICE/X-atoms (for X Windows),
               various CORBA implementations/clones,
               or cook up your own app/platform-specific protocol
               on top of sockets or pipes.

          I might try to spend some time creating
          an abstract framework for inter-app messaging.
          Something really dumb and simple, which covers
          the common cases. And then have multiple instantiations
          of the framework, perhaps one using simple UDP sockets,
          or using platform-specific stuff like COM or DCOP.
          And have multiple language bindings, with the ultimate
          aim of apps being able to do simple messaging in
          a portable manner ...

          Manoj