MIME-RPC as an FFI (was Re: Storable Class)

[S. Alexander Jacobson]

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Sven Panne wrote:
> Did you have a look at the FFI draft
>     http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ffi.ps.gz

I just read this paper.  It seems to focus on
local interfaces rather than on interfaces that
will also work accross network connections.

A modern FFI interface should offer both
transparent object serialization (like Java, but
readable) and interfaces that work between
programs running on different machines (RPC).

MIME provides the infrastructure required for
doing so.  It defines both a serialization format
and a public type system that individual
languages may support in different ways.

MIME is already in use in millions of web
applications and web browsers.

I've tried to document its use as an FFI at
MIME-RPC.com (and created a discussion
group for MIME-RPC related issues at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mime-rpc).

I had been thinking of it as a system for
inter-process messaging (as well as object
serialization),  and created an implementation in
Python for doing so.

However, there are no Haskell or C implementations
yet.  I would welcome thoughts from people here on
how to do both efficiently and how to use such
implementations for in-process communication as
well as network communication.

-Alex-

PS Dave Winer's Scripting.com just picked up
MIME-RPC so I think the idea is gaining some
traction.

___________________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson                   i2x Media
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