Einet is the home of Argot and Colony, tools for developing service oriented architectures(SOA) and other distributed computing systems.
Argot provides a method of data encoding and data mapping from an application or server to a binary data encoding. The Argot data encoding method is a departure from other solutions to data encoding such as ASN1, XML and CORBA's IIOP. Argot uses 21 unique primative meta types to describe the structure and format of information. A unique feature of this is that the meta data uses the same Argot binary encoding. This unique self describing binary format can allow information to encoded for use in both structured file formats and distributed communications.
Colony uses Argot to provide the middleware for creating distributed applications. Colony has functional similarities with XML web services, CORBA, and other distributed technologies. Colony has many features which make it better suited than XML based web services and CORBA in distributed applications. Colony provides a middleware framework which allows developers to be up and running quickly. At the same time the framework is flexible enough to allow a developer to change nearly every aspect of communications to suit their needs.
Both Argot and Colony are available under the Argot Public Licence. Argot is currently available for C, C# and Java. Colony is currently available for Java. Over time we intend to support a wide variety of langauages. Alpha versions of Argot for Lua, Python and Perl are availble via our subversion repository.
To learn more about Argot and Colony, read the following.
- Our vision for distributed computing and how Colony and Argot fit.
- An introduction to Argot and Colony.
- Tutorials for Argot and Colony
- Read White Papers for the background and technical details of Argot and Colony.
- Download Argot and Colony.
Colony and Argot are patent pending to protect the many years of development that have been required to translate these new ideas into working systems. However, to ensure easy uptake we allow Argot to be used freely in any open source software and in most commercial situations. Please see the License page for more details.