Re: [amsat-bb] AO40rcv and the Kenwood TS-2000

[Margaret Leber <maggie@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Timothy J. Salo wrote:

> Well, sort of.  I wouldn't call them particularly open or interoperable.

They're open as all hell...the implementation details are published. For 
"interoperable" we do have to ask "interoperable with what".

> A group of us tried using the Java object serialization facility to
> transfer Java objects containing data between Java applications on
> different machines...

Well, while that does sound like a good bit of fun, it's hard to 
understand why it was thought to be A Good Thing for whatever practical 
job you were trying to do. It certainly ensured *oodles* of overhead for 
no particular obvious benefit, and the devil's own time in unplanned and 
undesirable interactions between the environments. As you discovered. 
Shipping serialized objects isn't the same as RMI, of course.

> Using Java RMI ...also pretty much assumes that the remote software is written
> in Java...

Or uses an ORB.

 > ...A reasonable protocol would be language-independent.

Well, "language-independence" is Microsoft's mantra whenever they're 
Java-bashing, of course. I don't see anybody else in the software 
industry getting all hyped up about it. MS also didn't get hyped about 
it until they realized they weren't going to win fragmenting Java from 
the inside, so it was time to start poisoning the well from the outside.

Anybody who's written to Win32 in, say, COBOL or Fortran knows how 
language-independant *that* is, of course. These days 
"language-independance" seems to mostly be the battle cry of the C/C++ 
crowd.

Be that as it may, a message-based protocol would be Mostly Harmless. 
And RMI is OK too, *if* you're using a Java-based framework and have 
archtectural control at both ends. In many cases you don't, of course.

> However, for
> interconnecting amateur radio applications across a network, I recommend
> that some simple (extensible) protocol be developed...

I need to look at what the Internet Radio Linking Project people are 
doing on this front too someday soon. http://www.irlp.net/

  73 de Maggie K3XS

-- 
-----/___.   _)   Margaret Stephanie Leber    / "The art of progress  /
----/(, /|  /| http://voicenet.com/~maggie   / consists of preserving/
---/   / | / |  _   _   _    `  _AOPA 925383/ order amid change and /
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-/ (_/   '  K3XS  .-/ .-/    ARRL 39280   /___ --A.N.Whitehead ___/
/____ICQ 7161096_(_/_(_/__AMSAT 32844____/ <maggie@voicenet.com>


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