Re: Distributed programming in heterogeneous platforms

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

Yup. Not to mention all the problems you'll have fitting your average web
page into the 64k-words of memory you get with a Mil-Std-1750a processor.
:-)

Also, with the rapid evolution of Internet standards like XML, a military
program that is going to operate for dozens of years might adopt some spiffy
new standard only to discover that the world races past them to something
else before they've even fielded the system.

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

Send Replies To: m c o n d i c @ a c m . o r g

    "I'd trade it all for just a little more"
        --  Charles Montgomery Burns, [4F10]
======================================================================

Jim Rogers <jimmaureenrogers@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
news:3D910F02.9090006@worldnet.att.net...
>
>
> Clean but painfully slow data communication would be achieved.
> XML forces all data to be encoded as strings. There is also a significant
> overhead in XML tags being passed with the data. This allows strong
> platform independence, but is very inefficient.
>
> For most applications the inefficiencies are not important. The latency
> accessing a local or remote database may be orders of magnitude greater
> than the XML coding/decoding inefficiencies. For hard real time command
> and control systems the overhead of XML can be unbearable. In the robotics
> program I mentioned earlier we could not even bear the overhead of full
> IP protocol. We needed to send all our data at lower levels in the OSI
> stack. We were given a very narrow RF bandwidth and a maximum transmission
> rate of 24000 baud, with expected average transmission rates closer to
> 19.2K baud. In our situation XML would have been unacceptable.
>