Re: A proposal for a General Clustering Framework

[Michael E Brown <michael_e_brown@dell.com>]

One point... SOAP is designed to be transport-independent. There is at
least one implementation that lets you make (one-way) rpc calls via SMTP
as a transport.

Thus, it would be very easy to define a "multicast" transport for one-way
SOAP calls.

OK, that is SOAP, because I've read a bit about it and I know it supports
these things. XMLRPC, on the other hand, I can't quite say that I know as
much about this aspect, but I suspect it would be very easy to use XMLRPC
protocol but specify another transport for delivery.

The cool thing about the protocol concept is that you can have several
"wrappers" that let you make procedure calls that all use a unified
back-end library. What I mean is you can have (HTTP|SMTP|multicast|other)
access methods without writing any more code (except the transport
layer code, of course).

On your other topic, you want Name=Value pairs. Easy. The XMLRPC spec
defines:

--begin quote-->http://www.xmlrpc.com/spec
<struct>
   <member>
      <name>lowerBound</name>
      <value><i4>18</i4></value>
      </member>
   <member>
      <name>upperBound</name>
      <value><i4>139</i4></value>
      </member>
   </struct>


 <struct>s can be recursive, any <value> may contain a <struct> or any
other type, including an <array>, described below.
--end quote--


So, you simply define a "struct" such that:

<struct>
   <member>
      <name>Key</name>
      <value><string>SomeDataName</string></value>
   </member>
   <member>
      <name>Value</name>
      <value><string>The Value</string></value>
   </member>
</struct>


The datatype can be any of the defined datatypes (string/i4/etc...)
--
Michael





Linux-cluster: generic cluster infrastructure for Linux
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