On Tue, Sep 03, 2002 at 07:21:31AM +0900, Gabriel Emerson wrote:
> 
> Having said all of this, does anyone have something similar, or are there 
> existing technologies I should use while implementing this, or have I come 
> up with a completely silly idea?
> 
> Additional ideas include adding on a web-accessible monitor for the cache 
> and object creation, as well as perhaps a separate naming service.

This sounds really cool. I'm working on a project that, while its
objectives are a bit different from yours, may be complementary in some
interesting ways.

My effort is called RuFWS (Ruby Framework for Web Services--pronounced
'rufus'); there's no package or coherent documentation for it yet, but
I've got it set up as a SourceForge project, and I hope to have some
proof-of-concept code checked in this week. And you can be sure that
once I feel it's ready to expose to the world, I'll publicize the crap
out of it ;-)

But not to keep you completely in the dark, what I know so far about
RuFWS is that:

 * the essence of the project is to provide a set of Ruby libraries 
   that make it easy to construct and deploy XML-based web services

 * it uses plugins to the max, and any Ruby library that conforms to
   the very simple plugin API can be used as a plugin

 * it uses macros, which are combinations of built-in methods, plugin
   methods, and/or other macros, described in XML

 * it will probably provide both SOAP and REST interfaces, but it will
   have a REST interface first
   (what's REST? see http://www.xfront.com/REST.html)

 * it uses REXML as its primary XML processor

 * it operates as an Apache extension, using mod_ruby. I have no
   intention of writing yet another HTTP server

 * I'm trying to avoid getting too deep into object persistence issues.
   It's not my forte, and I'd rather work with some of the good software
   that already exists (or will exist by the time this project matures).
 

-- 
Matt Gushee
Englewood, Colorado, USA
mgushee / havenrock.com
http://www.havenrock.com/