IDL4 and flexible bindings

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

Those of you who will attend the Libre Software Meeting next week will
have the opportunity to hear about a component-based OS framework called
THINK [1].  One of its potential advantages over the multi-server
approach is that components are not necessarily servers: bindings
between components are very flexible and can be implemented by a
function call, a system call or an RPC.  The type of a binding between
two components can even be changed dynamically IIRC.  This gives the
ability to interpose on bindings and dynamically change the
implementation of a given service.

Looking at the `weaver' example that comes with IDL4 1.0.0, it seems
that IDL4 could be used pretty much like an open compiler.  For example,
it could be used to develop the same kind of flexible bindings as the
one used in THINK. :)  An interface for controlling bindings could be
created for each binding and it would, for instance, allow to load a
monitor (e.g. in the form of a dynamic library) which would be
automatically notified of any call to a function defined in the
interface.  This would make interposition and dynamic reconfiguration
easy to implement, and with relatively low overhead compared to stacked
servers.

Has there been any thoughts on this?

Thanks,
Ludovic.

[1] http://think.objectweb.org/