dispatch

Dispatch is a powerful multi-tier architecture object-oriented framework. It allows access to methods and variables via the command line, shell scripts, or GUI. The software package represents a meta program that is used to manage Unix programs. This program is still in the early stages, and you may face difficulty while compiling or using it for significant work. Additionally, many things are not documented as they only work occasionally. The current written code is only a framework, and you may need to invent much of what you want to do with it.

This framework is a class library in the domain of system administration, similar to Microsoft .NET, Corba or Unix, and is language independent. A method can be written in any language, as the method's interface is the same as that of a Unix command. This framework possesses the power of object orientation, which comes from abstract interfaces and concrete implementations that are interchangeable to a certain extent.

However, the existing software on POSIX-compliant systems so far does not honor this principle. An example of an interface relating to system management and configuration is internet server software configuration. Therefore, it's difficult to know where an arbitrary server listens if you don't write specialized parser code for every configuration file format in existence. The dispatch framework can help with that. It provides you an interface that has a method called port that you can call to either query the port or set it. You can then call the exact same method on any server that implements the interface without worrying about syntax rules.

With interpreted languages like Perl and others, dispatch is even better. First, the interpreter is dynamically linked into the current process, which in turn executes the method written in the target language. That means that the second call of a certain method only involves some lookup in internal data structures to find the already loaded (C++, Perl) and byte-compiled (Perl) implementation.

The difference to a shell script is that there is no actual execve system call involved in calling a method, but the method is in a shared object that can be linked dynamically into the running process. More importantly, the dispatch framework is equipped with various examples to make it easy to understand and implement. Thus, it's a must-try software for object-oriented application developers.