I had hoped that Thrift could be the one RPC to rule them all (finally have a good standard and be done with something that should have been settled 15 years ago). But a new RPC contender (Oracle Etch) is proposing incubation at Apache.
http://www.nabble.com/-PROPOSAL--Etch-tt18758520.html#a18758520 http://developer.cisco.com/web/cuae/etch So as a user, I'm now in the position of having to evaluate these seemingly (to me at least) very similar alternatives. While looking over Oracle's press release on Etch, I see this: '''Another Etch feature that differentiates it from SOAP is the ability for the server to initiate message traffic to the client once a connection is established. Etch also supports event-type messages: messages that don't require a response. These capabilities allow Etch to implement notification-style services, where a client can register to be notified of interesting events. As a result, applications can be designed on top of Etch that could also assume some responsibilities normally handled by an enterprise service bus.''' Which is nice. AFAIK, in CORBA the client would have passed an object to the server, which could invoke methods on it. Is there such a mechanism in Thrift? -Yonik
