Comments on: Just What We Need: Another RPC Package

By: David Ryan

David Ryan — Sat, 31 May 2008 07:45:20 +0000

I’m a bit late to this thread, but I’ll throw my 2c worth anyway. I think what this thread proves is that none of the standards have really stuck and got the long term continued adoption required. Even Mr CORBA himself is off with Erlang. Another Mr CORBA(Michi Henning) is off rebuilding CORBA, making Ice. A lot of people think SOAP (the saviour of the world) is fat and ugly. Apache is incubating Thrift. Now Cicso is throwing in Etch.

To me, the fact that we don’t have a really good solid answer to distributed computing means that more ideas are needed. I haven’t seen Etch yet, but I do hope it innovates and builds on the concepts of CORBA, SOAP and REST concepts. Each have great concepts that should be built upon. If they standardise it or not doesn’t concern me.

i built Argot(www.einet.com.au) to address what I think the real problem is. To me the real problem is in presentation and serialisation of data. If you get that right the transaction mechanism can be restful, or RPC, or Agent or whatever else. Atleast the data presentation is agreed. And in my book the presentation should be binary; it is afterall what computers are best at moving around. We just need better tools for designing structures, reading, debugging and versioning it.

Now if I could only find a Cisco or Google to support Argot, I could make it a standard too. :)

By: Rajith Attapattu

Rajith Attapattu — Sat, 24 May 2008 03:36:13 +0000

I had my fair share of frustrations with SOAP (RPC style), EJB and also CORBA to a certain extent. Given a choice I will always use messaging over RPC. If you have to use SOAP/WSDL then of course document style is always less painful than the terrible RPC crap. I don’t think anybody is using the dreaded rpc-encoded style anymore.

If HTTP doesn’t work for you and If you need to write message oriented distributed systems in multiple languages then “AMQP may be a good alternative. It already has support with clients in C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Ruby and of course Erlang.

By: Darach

Darach — Sat, 24 May 2008 01:54:24 +0000

Too many ‘RPC’s. Not enough time. :)

I’ve been learning Q/Kdb+ (http://kx.com/q/d/kdb+.htm) recently by Andrew Whitney from Kx Systems. Q is an RDBMS, a SQL, a general purpose data-parallel implicitly concurrent and a parallel/grid programming system

The following Q program defines a ‘trade’ table, and random data generation recipe to
populate 1 million tuples in the table… in 3 lines of code.

n:1000000
stocks:`goog`iona`ibm`msft`ebay`intel
trade:([]symbol:n?stocks; price:n?100.0;amount:100*10+n?20; time:n?24:00:00.000)

When run it can be accessed RESTfully over HTTP and resources returned in csv, xml, html, and/or can be queried and updated dynamically via HTTP, ODBC or JDBC.

Q is an interesting departure from other languages, however, it lacks what is in my opinion UBFs most interesting contribution: its introspective nature and the ability of a UBF distributed system component to describe itself. The fact that the protocol state is explicit and not implied (like in most/all traditional RPCs) is wonderful. That the protocol state can be asserted is a very powerful idea. Nice!

By: Defending RPC » Josh the Outspoken

Defending RPC » Josh the Outspoken — Sat, 24 May 2008 01:09:43 +0000

[...] Vinoski has come out very vocally against RPC in the last few days: see this blog entry and this mailing list post. The blog entry (which I read first) made him sound like someone who [...]

By: jay

jay — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:44:20 +0000

Another alternative is AMF3 by Adobe.

AMF3 Benchmarks
http://www.jamesward.org/census/