[offtopic] marshalling

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, 02 Jan 2001 14:50:24 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
linas@linas.org  said:
> This is way off-topic, but ...
> 
> It's been rumoured that Tyson Dowd said:
> >
> > (Actually M$ has a lot more in the whole language infrastructure thing,
> > since their VM supports multiple language interoperation at the data
> > level on the same machine -- no marshalling required.  
> 
> Well, that's kind-of what we do with g-wrap, and its kind-of what's
> behind one of the original early claims of gnome's ORBit: that with
> orbit, a call on the same machine would be roughly as fast as an
> ordinary subroutine call. (I don't know if they kept that promise).
> 
> Here's the question: if one writes a soap dtd/schema in the M$
> framework, it will then auto-generate language bindings for several 
> languages? (i.e. they treat the  soap dtd/schema as an IDL for 
> all practical purposes? OR did they invent some new IDL language?)

None of the above.

What SOAP amounts to is a way of transmitting around messages in XML
form.

Which means that "marshalling" amounts to, on the transmission side,
generating a string/stream that is an XML document.  And on the
"receiver" side, "demarshalling" involves parsing an XML document
and extracting the tags.

See:
http://www.pythonware.com/products/soap/profile.htm
for more details.

The "clever marshalling" thing with ORBit most certainly Does Not
Apply _in spades_ to SOAP.
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