Applications Messaging Standard

[John Taylor]

On 15 Feb 2007, at 22:21, Doug Tody wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, John Taylor wrote:
>
>>> IP (sockets) on the other hand, were designed for this purpose.
>>> A simple solution is to provide a well-known port for discovery
>>> (basically just a simple keyword-value cache; back it up with an
>>> environment variable or whatever to config the address)), and  
>>> hand-off
>>> to dynamically allocated ports for session stuff.  This can all  
>>> be done
>>> at the protocol level without an API, is universally available,  
>>> and is
>>> really not much more complex than using a file.  Probably less  
>>> complex,
>>> when you consider the subtle issues that files have for this  
>>> purpose.
>>
>> I'd be interested to know how much easier or harder it would be to  
>> use IP from relatively primitive programming environments such as  
>> IDL (that's not a slur on IDL...it's very sophisticated in other  
>> ways).
>
> Well, we are after all talking about messaging software right?  Any
> system/app/language using this will already have had to figure out how
> to talk to a socket.

It could be that access is available at a higher level.  For  
instance, if we had something http-get-based as a wire protocol then  
you could use conceivably send a message from a  bash script using  
curl or wget, but might have a harder time connecting to a plain old  
socket (I'm just using this as an example; I'm no bash expert and I'm  
not sure that you'd necessarily want to access the system from bash).