Applications Messaging Standard

[John Taylor]

On 8 Feb 2007, at 17:19, Doug Tody wrote:

> On Thu, 8 Feb 2007, John Taylor wrote:
>
>> On 8 Feb 2007, at 15:12, Doug Tody wrote:
>>
>>>    o	Separate protocol from implementation.  That is, we should be
>>>    	able to implement a message bus/hub in different languages such
>>> 	as Java or C, or layer the protocol on top of an existing robust
>>> 	messaging infrastructure such as D-Bus, MPI, PVM, ActiveMQ,
>>> 	Ice, CORBA, etc.  It is fine to have a simple hub (or two)
>>> 	developed as part of the standard, which doesn't queue messages,
>>> 	guarantee delivery, and so forth.
>>
>> I agree that this is desirable.  There might be a trade off here  
>> between the wire protocols we can offer in a Hub, and the  
>> languages it is possible to use to write one.  We probably don't  
>> need to worry about as many languages as we do for client  
>> applications messaging though.
>
> At least for the simpler wire protocols, it should be possible to  
> implement
> the infrastructure with almost any language or technology.

Possible, but not necessarily practical.  I'd be happy to live with  
not being able to write a "Hub" in IDL if that was the sacrifice  
necessary to include easy-to-use protocols in the hub.  My point is  
that the set of languages in which we need to write a Hub is  
different, and probably smaller than, the set of languages we need to  
support for clients.  It might be useful to know what these languages  
are so that we can decide what wire protocols are of interest.  It's  
even possible we could make some or all of the wire protocols  
optional, but as Mark pointed out, that needs some careful thought.