Apps Messaging - Semantics of a Message

[John Taylor]

On 16 Apr 2007, at 16:31, Rob Seaman wrote:

> Noel Winstanley wrote:
>
>> It is my understanding that it was the real-world success of  
>> plastic that piqued IVOA's interest in messaging. I talked to  
>> several of the exec whilst at moscow - the impression I got was  
>> that their desire was for a plastic-like cleaned-up international  
>> standard.
>
> The IVOA exec often gets something different than it asked for :–)
>
> With no smiley, I think either path being discussed would be  
> responsive to the WG's charge.
>
>> Although designing a generalized messaging system is attractive I  
>> don't think that this is what we've been asked for. There's plenty  
>> of these already in existence - from CORBA, through COM, to SOAP -  
>> designed by more, and better qualified people than us.  Actually,  
>> some of these aren't even very good - but I doubt our committee  
>> will design better.
>
> Here you're arguing both ends against the middle.  CORBA is the  
> poster child for design by committee.  I also don't think that the  
> discussion has been about a generalized messaging system.  Whatever  
> "astronomical applications messaging" is, it isn't this.  A main  
> architectural question is whether "VOOOM" (or whatever it will be  
> called) will be constrained to applications running on a single  
> host.  That doesn't sound like CORBA to me.

Hi Rob - actually, this much has already been agreed.  Early on we  
settled that, initially at least, we'll only try to tackle the  
problem of messaging between applications on a single machine  
(actually, for a single user).   That said, no doubt there are folks  
keeping half an eye on what needs to be done to extend the work to  
multiple hosts.

>
> I'd also argue that the astronomical software community itself  
> contains many of the "better qualified people".  We're a small, but  
> feisty, group that attracts interest from many larger players due  
> not only to the niftiness of the science of astronomy, but also to  
> the interesting bit of computing phase space that astronomical use  
> cases transect.

I guess the proof will come when we see companies dropping their SOAP  
APIs in favour of VOOOM.

John