On Tue, 13 Feb 2007, Doug Burke wrote:
> I am not trying to suggest that XPA be used instead of PLASTIC. I just
> wondered whether the XPA experience here would provide any useful input to
> this part of the discussion.
>
> [1] http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/xpa/
> [2] http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/xpa/xpans.html
XPA and PLASTIC are very similar in terms of scope and usage, and I think this new inter-tool messaging standard could benefit from both experiences.
BTW, scanning the recent messages I still see a lot about dot files etc. This is an implementation issue; platform specific issues such as dot files in U*nix can be dealt with by the implementation, and do not have to be addressed by the standard protocol. Just define an implementation neutral messaging standard, and do a couple of initial implementations in some straightforward, simple fashion. We just want enough flexibility in implementation to allow integration with more sophisticated messaging frameworks in the future, without having to change all the apps.