Re: Distributed programming in heterogeneous platforms

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

It would probably be too grossly inefficient. Lots of these things are
operating on really tight time budgets and there is usually a need for
highly deterministic behavior. They could have built systems like this using
string data in the Unix/Network flavor but that drastically increases the
amount of data you're sending and increases the time to parse it at the
other end. That's why usually they use raw binary representations. RPCs
might be used in some contexts, but typically that's making assumptions
about what is at the other end of the hose. Binary message passing is just
too efficient, reliable, predictable and flexible to be easily replaced by
something else.

You've got to remember that an awful lot of military systems are built upon
(and will continue to be built upon) really old technology. B-52's first
flew when? 1947? '48? They're still in the inventory and probably will be
for years to come. Environmental requirements (temperature extremes,
rad-hardness, etc.) are often really tough to meet with state of the art
technology. Soldiers don't like it when you bet their lives on new and
unproven technology. As a result, you've got to work with things differently
than is commonly done with Internet-age technology.

MDC
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
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Robert C. Leif <rleif@rleif.com> wrote in message
news:mailman.1032912362.1385.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> What would happen if the Ada Distributed Systems Annex were used with
> XML messages that were validated by both the sender and receiver with
> the same XML schema?
> Bob Leif
>