Applications Messaging Standard

[Doug Tody]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, John Taylor wrote:
>> I think this is way overstated - I see people doing all kinds of complex
>> things such as SOAP with IDL (or IRAF, whatever).  If nothing else, with
>> a C-based environment, all you do is write a messaging plug-in.
>
> SOAP from IDL?  I'm impressed.  You couldn't point me to an XML-RPC library 
> for IDL could you?  We've been looking for one for ages.
>
> More seriously, if we chose a messaging system that wasn't easily accessible 
> from IDL, yes, we could write a plugin, or even a standalone application that 
> translated the IVOA messaging system to something more easily accessible. 
> But, if these requirements could be considered from the outset that would be 
> nice.

I'm not kidding, we have had IDL (and IRAF) doing this sort of thing
in the NVO summer schools over here for several years.  The IDL
implementation is SOAP-based (for IRAF we use VOClient).  Note, IDL
supports interfaces to software written in various languages, including
even Java.  For Java there is something called an IDL-Java bridge.

 	- Doug