At 12:44 PM 9/10/2005, Rich Morin wrote:
My interest here is in being able to have multiple scripts inter-operate
in POE-style, even if:
* they are running on different machines
So you'd need some way of communicating over a network between the
different machines.
* they are written in different languages
So, you'd need some sort of common mechanism for describing data and
the events/actions to be performed.
I realize, of course, that they wouldn't run as efficiently as they
would if they were all running under the same interpreter, but the
flexibility could be really useful.
So if flexibility is important, you'd like some sort of
self-describing mechanism for the data and the methods...
How close does POE come to this now?
I can't answer this, exactly.
Would it be worthwhile to put
together an interface spec for other languages to build to?
While there is more than one way to do it, why re-invent the wheel?
This is exactly the sort of problem space that "Web Services" - which
is "XML-RPC over HTTP" or "SOAP" - is trying to solve in a very large
way. XML dictionaries for things like all regular transactions in
the insurance industry, or the financial industry, or or or, have
been created.
There are still some ongoing implementation problems - shared
authentication/authorization, the poor quality of HTTP as a
transport, and etc - that have limited the widespread domination of
WebServices across the internet.
SOAP is exactly what you want. Or at least, near enough for most things.
This problem space gets *really* interesting on the enterprise
level. "Service Oriented Architecture" is a good buzzword these
days for running an entire business as a set of distributed procedure
calls, with a set of engines and transports to link them all together.
If SOAP is not what you want, you probably want Grid.
-Jeff
