[erlang-questions] rpc is bad? (was Re: facebook chat server)

[Ben Hood]

Steve,

On 24 May 2008, at 22:37, Steve Vinoski wrote:
> Another
> approach is to keep the Any data in marshaled form until it reaches a
> point that knows how to unmarshal it. Implementing all that support in
> a way that's reasonably efficient can be fun and challenging, but it's
> an example that shows there could be many different representations
> for the same data type, depending on context, even within just one
> language.

Good point. I think that at the end of the day what I going to couple  
you is the semantics of the operation even if you do find some kind of  
funky late-binding approach that can deal with different namespaces,  
field names, field ordering or class versions. Another approach may  
just be to let neural agents recognize the binary data structures and  
just train them until they're putting the data in the right pigeon  
holes (at least most of the time).

>
>> I ask this question because I took the following approach ( http://hopper.squarespace.com/blog/2008/5/22/pet-store-part-1.html
>>  ) to the problem you are talking about, but am just questioning
>> whether my own approach has any merit at all.
>
> I glanced over it and it looks fine to me, though I did see the word
> "RPC" used there a few times ;-).

Well it's asynchronous RPC if that makes it less evil ;-)

If understand you correctly though, you are saying that the RPC style  
of defining a endpoint to dispatch data to is limiting because if you  
change the *server* side semantics or syntax, this means that you have  
to change the client at the same time, right?

Ben