DBus over the network; clustered machines acting as one; service discovery

[Shawn Rutledge]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 6:18 PM, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> wrote:
>  This was not what DBus was designed for.  Now, the way I think of the
>  network protocol space is that it's a bit like programming languages;
>  the space is very wide.  There are also a lot of established systems,
>  but it's not hard to invent new systems, and there is definitely still
>  room for innovation.

Of course I know about some of them.  But you could also say that DBus
re-invented the wheel just a bit, no?  The Berlin project (later
renamed) was trying to use all-Corba all the time on the desktop, and
Gnome used to be heading that direction too.  For some reason it
stalled, and in general DBus is more popular for on-desktop IPC.  I
missed some of the details on why Gnome went that direction, etc.
(Probably Corba was just too much work, and it takes a lot of
experience to get really proficient with it; which I'm not.)  But I
think network transparency is going to be more critical in the future.
 If I had been trying to solve the problem that DBus does, back before
it existed, I would probably have been inclined to start with sockets
(to get network transparency right at the outset) and later use Unix
sockets and/or shared memory as an optimization (following the same
kind of design evolution that X protocol did).  So now I think after
having started on just one machine, eventually it will have to evolve
the other direction (going from one machine to clusters), and the end
result ought to be the same: it will do some or most of what Corba
did, and hopefully without the same cost.  It does try to be
efficient, right?