Re: dylan revival

[address@hidden]

On Saturday, April 6, 2002, at 03:00 AM, marc wrote:

> So is anyone 'porting' XML-RPC to SOAP?

Not that I know of. SOAP has limited adoption, is much more complex than 
XML-RPC, and I'm unconvinced of its advantages.

> What would be also needed for WebServices is an easy way to 'export'
> functions as WebMethods like in c# (ughh, yes):
>
> [WebMethod]
> public int getReason () { return 42; }
>
> -> generates SOAP stubs/skeletons as well as the appropriate WSDL-file
> entries.
>
> So, a dylan (macro) lib allowing equivalent (or superior) ease of use
> would be of great help.

You can't generate external code using macros, but a cookie preprocessor 
that looked for hints in comments would be easy enough to do:

define /*web*/ method get-reason() => (reason :: <integer>) 42 end;

Gwydion has one if these for building Dylan interfaces automatically. If 
you limited (or mapped) the types a Dylan web method can use it should 
be simple enough. I wrote two (unfinished) Dylan-to-Objective-C systems. 
One used knowledge of runtime internals, the other used a preprocessor. 
Either approach could help glue Dylan code to an application server.

> What is the current thinking about a dylan-virtual-machine in this
> group?

I mentioned the Mindy VM from Gwydion. It takes up 233k on my hard disk, 
and that's before we include the libraries. :-/ Maybe it's compiled for 
Debug. :-) I don't know what we'd build on for an "embedded Dylan" 
initiative, it would be great but even with Sun's marketting machine 
behind it it took embedded Java a couple of tries to start getting 
adopted .

- Rob.