Thought of the day: was RE: Gen_server and Gen_fsm questions

[Marc van Woerkom]

>On my way to work I was thinking about Remote Procedure 
>Calls (RPC's)
>  and !! and HTTP and SIP and all that kind of stuff.
>
>Why are there so many *different* formats and ways of 
>doing the *same* thing?

* At some point it is probably the "not invented here" 
syndrome
* a HTTP call is easier than RPC (which requires you to 
know C), and ASCII is easier than BINARY, or? :-)
* SOAP seems to be b*llsh*t, if it is just an RPC call 
transcribed into ASCII and served via HTTP to tunnel the 
pesky firewalls. However one hope behind using XML in RPCs 
was to document and enrich interfaces in such a way, that 
machine to machine communication (agents) are possible, I 
hope that is what those "semantic web" guys aim for 

The idea to stick to HTTP calls seems to appear on the 
O'Reilly emerging tech conference:

   "Just" Use HTTP
   Sam Ruby, Senior Technical Staff Member, Emerging 
Technologies Group, IBM
   http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_sess/5968

Regards,
Marc