Is there any interests in libraries for distributed message passing and event dispatching? There are many aspects involved in the design of these systems ...
Yes, definite interest from me, and I think you'll find a lot of interest from other developers or organizations. I assume you have (or will) port from using ACE to using Asio - unless major problems are found with Asio (and I don't think the major review from a few months ago found any), that would be the library to use for the lower-level socket and demuxing encapsulation. I don't see any need to duplicate the functionality of Asio inside your own library or framework (which is a higher-level layer than Asio). Besides (and probably in parallel with) the issues you're trying to solve, I've written libraries that provided: 1. Incoming and outgoing message filter chaining (functionality that was just mentioned last week in relation to Asio, I think). This allows applications or libraries to easily add functionality such as encryption, compression, validation, recording, monitoring, or other application-specific processing. 2. Customizable "message" encapsulation / boundary processing, in the sense that every distributed processing scheme has a defined protocol that delimits a message. E.g. a text stream message might be delimited by a new-line, a binary message might have the length encoded as the first field, a binary message might be a fixed-size "struct", a text protocol such as XML has specific matched delimiters, etc. I'd be very much interested in a higher-level layer that solved some of the needs associated with certain kinds of distributed processing: a. Pub-sub (as you've already mentioned) - is this based on an existing pub-sub spec or API? (E.g. DDS or JMS) There should be a good justification for providing yet another pub-sub model (versus basing it on something like DDS). b. Distributed state / data store (as provided by the library or framework, not by an external database). c. Scalability aspects. (I'll be happy to write more details, if needed.) d. Fault-tolerant aspects. (I'll be happy to write more details, if needed.) I'll catch up with the rest of the Boost e-mail to see if other people have written anything similar ... Cliff