[Isolate-interest] Links provide one-way synchronous communication

[Bill Foote]

Doug Lea wrote:
> [Most of us responsible for second public draft have been either
> traveling or busy hitting other deadlines or both, so replies
> and discussions might be delayed.]
> 
> Sutanu Ghosh wrote:
> 
>>
>> What is the rationale behind not making Link fully
>> bi-directional as Socket ? That way, both isolates can
>> use the same Link for send and receive.
>>
> 
> The Link API is not intended to be an application-layer
> API, so is not very user-friendly. The main goal was to specify
> a small and efficient mechanism that can be provided
> across the various implementation approaches to Isolates,
> over which you can layer socket-like, IPC-like, RMI-like, JMS-like, etc
> middleware frameworks. There have been some research reports by people
> doing this. See for example, Krzysztof Palacz's Purdue PhD thesis (which
> I can't find online at the moment) and paper's by Greg's
> Sun labs groups at http://research.sun.com/projects/barcelona/
> 
> -Doug
>

In a similar vein, Links have been found to be perfect for
implementing inter-Xlet communication, that is,
javax.microedition.xlet.ixc in Personal Basis Profile.
IXC is a mechanism superficially similar to RMI, but
with important semantic simplifications.

Bill