From: Massimiliano Mirra <list@...>
Date: 2001-12-11T11:05:23+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:28163] Design question: remote UIs and distributed objects

I am toying with the idea of writing a tiny drawing program that acts
as a server and is accessible by remote user interfaces.

The engine/server should be written in Ruby.  I'd rather use
distributed objects than create a whole communication protocol from
the ground up.  I'd also rather not to enforce the choice of language
for client applications (which leaves out drb).

AFAIK the players in this arena are CORBA, XML-RPC and SOAP.  Of these
I have only tried XML-RPC and it is wonderfully easy, but I see no
chance of passing around whole objects like in drb (one could marshal
them of course, but would defeat the language independence).  I gather
that CORBA is far from easy or even moderately difficult, so I'm going
checking SOAP.

My question: does this really deserve study or is it a lost cause?  Is
there any chance to send around anything more complex than hashes and
arrays?  And, above all, is performance any close to being acceptable
for the feedback requirements of a user interface or would it be like
telnetting over a 2400bps connection?

Massimiliano