Jini and Lisp anyone?
Dynamic typed languages seem to be garnering a lot of attention these days. It got me to thinking, could you implement a Jini like system on top of Lisp? (or pick your favorite language du jour). You would need support for the following:
Dynamically loading downloaded code. No problem for Lisp here.
Performing some kind of verification on the safety and trustworthiness of that code. Digital code signing should be easy, but would Lisp support something equivalent to the Java byte code verifier?
A sandbox environment to safely run the downloaded code. Could you do this efficiently in Lisp, or would you need major surgery to the underlying VM (or whatever it's called in Lisp parlance :-) )
My contribution to such an effort would be the name (every new project needs a cool name). How about Jisp? Or maybe Lini?
So which lisp are you thinking of?
With a fellow conspirator, I recently wrote a Jini ConfigurationProvider which used Groovy as the language. We've given consideration to using Armed Bear Common Lisp as another platform for doing this, but I worry about some of the things they warn about on their website. http://armedbear.org/abcl.html
Anyway, I've often thought the same thing that you muse about here, but have come to the conclusion that it might be best to start from a JVM-based lisp implementation and try to build around Jini rather than replace it in another language.
Posted by Van Simmons on March 01, 2006 at 05:22 PM MST #
Posted by Larry Mitchell on March 02, 2006 at 12:25 PM MST #