re: front & back end communication / was GUI ...



Macsyma(commercial) has a front/back end communication
whose specs may be available;  allegro CL has a front-end
(optional) IDE.  I think that openmath or mathml has the
significant disadvantage of being about 100 times longer
than necessary. In the words of one openmath advocate
"it compresses very well".
I believe mathlink has no particularly clever encoding
of mathematica stuff. Just text that looks like mathematica
commands, embedded in headers and communication stuff.
And I've been using sockets for a web site (Tilu) written
in lisp, since 1996 or so.

There is at least one corba implementation for lisp, and
there is also Java serialization, remote procedure call.

I am not an expert on any of this, and I haven't been
studying this thread, so maybe I've repeated stuff or
raised dead issues, in which case my apologies.

RJF

Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:
> On Wed, 2003-06-11 at 11:25, James Amundson wrote:
> 
>>> I believe Mathematica invented a protocal specifically to deal with
>>>this issue.
>>
>>The MathLink protocol has kernel <-> gui communication as a subset. It
>>also provides a mechanism for other programs to communicate with
>>Mathematica. I admire the *idea* of MathLink, even though I am
>>unfamiliar with the implementation. 
> 
> 
> It has a non-free licence as well, according to:
> 
>  http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/mathlink/license.html
> 
> ... which pretty much rules it out.
> 
> What about CORBA + OpenMath ?
>