From: Ray Capozzi Date: 2003-03-11T12:09:31+09:00 Subject: Re: Protocols Wow. Lots of good stuff. No definite winner yet. Kind of sad that in this day and age this rather simple issue has yet to be resolved. Have all the smart CS people decided to boycott every-day issues? I am but a mere accounting guy, so obviously the bribes to look the other way have effected me. Cleary I've gotta do some due dilligence. I'd like to have a language independent solution, but as Brain Candler has pointed out, drb has some real performance advantages. In my place of employment, we deal with C, C++, TCL, Perl, java, and more. I'd like to not lock into anything so specific as DRuby. On the other hand, if the gains are so compelling, well .. . . Well druby seems so cool that I would just have to do it. Too bad that does not net me anything on the resume. Anyways. . . I'd like to clarrify my XML concerns. Lucky Stiif makes a point that YAML is more compact over XML. XML is easy to read. Soo too is Yaml. Xml is less than compact (more vorbose) than YAML. XML, therefor, seems the lazy man's out. I'm not paid to be a script kiddie. Xml means more bytes going over the wire. YAML simplifies mashelling objects (data). From the old days, I was taught "Wires are slow. Don't put stuff on the wire." Cisco may disagree. Too be sure, bandwidth is only one measure of total network performance. Latency is the other. A chatty protocol with small chucks on a highly latent network will still be slow. Great set of ideas guys. I'll have to review the total messages/server to better understand the chattiness of this scenario. I've yet to completely think though the required throughput for the total system. I know I've got at least 12 servers to start with. More are always potential. In this day and age, less are equally possible, if you catch the drift. I surely appreciate the input. It is nice to know that my issues are not unique. I promise an update as to the course of (in)action. I'm sure we all appreciate the fogginess of the prior statement. Shoot. Maybe I'll take the easy way out. Maybe I'll just rewrite in VB.