Communication with Super Flexible Messaging

Super Flexible Messaging (SFM) provides a powerful and elegant message passing abstraction for transferring arbitrary data between remote processes. SFM achieves the simplicity of stream-oriented mechanisms and the ability to transfer structured data as found in high-level remote object invocation systems. Leveraging off of dynamic typing and named arguments in functions, SFM offers a simple syntax for sending structured data as attribute-value pairs between processes. A programmer can easily concentrate on algorithmic development because the specification of data to be transferred is done exclusively using a send() invocation. The recv() call can selectively choose incoming messages by specifying concrete attribute-value pairs or by constraining matches to a subset of attribute values. Our current implementation is in Python, but the SFM concept can be ported to other dynamically typed languages with named argument syntax. This paper presents the SFM mechanism, its implementation, some SFM examples, and a performance evaluation.