Scott, I've been using ToolTalk in my project at NOAA for several
months now. I wrote a simple encapsulation of it in C++, and I also
have a line on a much more detailed encapsulation developed by Mark
Soloway (Mark.Soloway@Eng.Sun.Com).
Its a pretty good messaging system with lots of flexibility. Its
mainly intended for sending short messages between processes with
network transparency, so our group relies on NFS for large data
transfers.
ToolTalk is currently being marketed for non-Sun platforms by Pencom
Software, in Austin, TX ((512) 343-9650). A single seat developers
license is about $500. Other licenses, including distribution licenses
are available for $1,500, as best I recall. A guy named Mike Waters
was my contact for info at Pencom.
Before we adopted ToolTalk, I contacted a contractor on the east coast
who was doing a very large project using ToolTalk. They were running
it in a very heterogeneous environment: Unix, DEC VMS and IBM machines
were involved. The project leader said that ToolTalk had been one of
the more reliable components, and had done very well at message
delivery and reliability.
Greg