Applications Messaging Standard

[John Taylor]

On 13 Feb 2007, at 19:39, Doug Tody wrote:

> 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.

Yes and no.   How one goes about getting the information required to  
connect could be part of the protocol.  You've already mentioned  
passing this in on the commandline when you start an application.   
Another (and arguably more user-friendly) way would be to put this  
information in a well-known location on the file system where client  
applications can find it.

> 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
>