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

[Ben Hood]

Steve,

Great post!

On 23 May 2008, at 23:24, Steve Vinoski wrote:

> Message queuing systems work well because (in no particular
> order):

.....

> * payloads need not conform to some made-up IDL type system
> * getting two different messaging systems to interoperate is easier
> than getting two different RPC or distributed object systems to
> interoperate

Just out of interest's sake, in your experience, is there a *right*  
way to interpret the payload of the message?

With IDL/WSDL you know ahead of time how to decode the payload, if you  
defer it to a *dynamic* approach, IMHO you have to some kind of a  
priori knowledge of the structure of the data and have to be able to  
create instances of those data structures on the fly in your target  
language.

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.

Thx,

Ben