Applications Messaging Standard

[Doug Tody]

On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, Doug Burke wrote:

> I am not trying to suggest that XPA be used instead of PLASTIC. I just 
> wondered whether the XPA experience here would provide any useful input to 
> this part of the discussion.
>
> [1] http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/xpa/
> [2] http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/xpa/xpans.html

XPA and PLASTIC are very similar in terms of scope and usage, and
I think this new inter-tool messaging standard could benefit from
both experiences.

BTW, scanning the recent messages I still see a lot about dot files
etc.  This is an implementation issue; platform specific issues such
as dot files in U*nix can be dealt with by the implementation, and
do not have to be addressed by the standard protocol.  Just define an
implementation neutral messaging standard, and do a couple of initial
implementations in some straightforward, simple fashion.  We just want
enough flexibility in implementation to allow integration with more
sophisticated messaging frameworks in the future, without having to 
change all the apps.

 	- Doug