communication / middleware

Dear all,

Unfortunately, the discussion on middleware / communication took place
in the thread of the OROCOS II proposal. I therefore open a new thread
where the middleware discussion can be continued.

Just to refer to Anthony Mallet's remarks. He of course is fully right
in suggesting to use an alternative mechanism beneath the communication
patterns. I see no problem at all in using the SmartSoft communication
patterns on top of a different (and perhaps less resource consuming
approach than CORBA) communication mechanism like RPC for example. So
what are the only requirements ?

- I need a naming service where I can locate a service provider. The
naming service is only used internally by the communication patterns and
is not visible to the SmartSoft user !
- The communication mechanism has to provide oneway communication that
is sending a message without returning parameters
- To ease implementation of some control messages one needs a
synchronous remote method invocation (only used for control messages
requiring only very short processing time)
- A marshalling mechanism for the data types to be transmitted which is
used inside the get/set interface functions of communication objects

That's all ! So there is no problem at all to setup the SmartSoft
communication patterns on top of RPC. But it makes sense to still use
the communication patterns and not to try to use plain RPC calls inside
your components.

Regards

Christian

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Christian Schlegel
FAW Ulm (Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing)
PO Box 2060
D-89010 Ulm
Germany

Tel. : ++49 (731) 501 8949
Fax  : ++49 (731) 501 999
email: [email protected]
WWW  : http://www.faw.uni-ulm.de/
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