Axum for Inter Process Communication

Question

Hi

Having tried Axum in version 1.0, i find that the concepts are great. However, I don't think I will ever need to use it in a single process, as there are so many other good approaches how to make concurrency safer and simpler, which are possibly easier to prgram with.

I would be very interested to learn how I can use Axum in a distributed setting, between processes. I feel like in most approaches to IPC, there is a lack of protocol specification. E.g. remoting is great to share objects, but the receiver can call the methods on it in any order. Sockets and all it's abstractions are great but there is need to explicitly serialize stuff.

As I read first about Axum, I thought this would be something like the IPC in Singularity. There are so many great IPC concepts in Singularity that would be very useful to have on a regular .NET basis. Axum brings some of them to a single process.

Are there any steps planned to extend Axum into the Direction of IPC?
Is there a possibility to use Axum in its current form in combination with e.g. remoting?

Regards, Banjobeni

Answer 1

Hi Banjobeni,

Thanks for the post.  Before I even jump into IPC, there's one thing you said that piqued my interest: "as there are so many other good approaches how to make concurrency safer and simpler, which are possibly easier to program with."   What approaches are concurrent, safe, simple, and easy to program with?  I don't ask to challenge you, I'm geniunely curious as to what technologies and models our customers think have these properties. We don't want to overlook anything or exaggerate the seriousness of the problem.

As for IPC, have you looked at the sections in the spec and programmer's guide on Distributing Axum?  I think you'll find what you need.  In a nutshell, Axum is tightly integrated with WCF to allow you to easily communicate across process boundaries (and network boundaries) with any of the transports WCF supports, whether that be HTTP, TCP, or Named Pipes.

Hope that helps,
Josh

Answer 2

I will look into the section you mentioned.

I am a computer science student, so my answer will not be one of a typical customer. Other approaches include STM, strict locking and using parallel libraries. I do know that this does not cover all possible applicaiton fields of concurrency, but I'm looking forward to try axum in its 0.2 version.

Offtopic: If I try to install Axum 2.0 for VS2008, then somewehere in the middle of the installation VS2008 (previously not running) crashes and the installer fails. Do you know how to circumvent this? I uninstalled Axum 1.0 before.

Answer 3

I am a computer science student

I think most of us that use Axum are students XP. Kind of ironic if you think about it. Sorry to be off topic.