On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, John Taylor wrote:
>> I think this is way overstated - I see people doing all kinds of complex
>> things such as SOAP with IDL (or IRAF, whatever). If nothing else, with
>> a C-based environment, all you do is write a messaging plug-in.
>
> SOAP from IDL? I'm impressed. You couldn't point me to an XML-RPC library
> for IDL could you? We've been looking for one for ages.
>
> More seriously, if we chose a messaging system that wasn't easily accessible
> from IDL, yes, we could write a plugin, or even a standalone application that
> translated the IVOA messaging system to something more easily accessible.
> But, if these requirements could be considered from the outset that would be
> nice.
I'm not kidding, we have had IDL (and IRAF) doing this sort of thing in the NVO summer schools over here for several years. The IDL implementation is SOAP-based (for IRAF we use VOClient). Note, IDL supports interfaces to software written in various languages, including even Java. For Java there is something called an IDL-Java bridge.