From: rise <rise@...>
Date: 2001-04-24T05:59:59+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:14105] Re: Distributed Ruby and heterogeneous networks

On Tue, 24 Apr 2001, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

> I'm talking about the transmission format, and about changing it for
> something similar to Data::Dumper (of Perl fame). One side would generate
> ruby code from the datastructures and the other side would call eval() on
> what it gets.

This would be of great interest to me.  I've been toying with a project
using DRB that would allow you to create a new thread that would serialize
itself, launch the thread on a remote DRB server, and then replace the
created thread with a stub using the DRB connection to control the remote
thread.  The basic idea is to allow something like

	RemoteThread.new( 'hostname', 'port') { |hostname, port|
		# do something on remote server
		return_value = system('ls')

		# put the return value into the local thread's shared
		# variable
		Thread.current['return value'] = $?
	}

without having a DRB object type availabe on the far end for each action
you want to perform.  Obviously there are security concerns (SSL is likely
required), and one of the big ones would be running Marshalled code that's
opaque to the receiver.  A Data::Dumper equivalent would let me do some
sanity checks as well as executing with a higher $SAFE level.

-- 
Jonathan Conway 	   The thing about Unix is that all the hoops are
rise@knavery.net           flaming, so at least you know where they are...