Passing messages between remote MailboxProcessors?

Question

I'm using MailboxProcessor classes in order to keep separate agents that do their own thing. Normally agents can communicate with one another in the same process, but I want agents to talk to one another when they are on separate processes or even different machines. What kind of mechanism is best for implementing communication between them? Is there some standard solution?

Please note that I'm using Ubuntu instances to run the agents.

Answer 1

I think you're going to have write your own routines to serialize messages, pass them accross the process boundaries and then dispatch them on the other side. This will also require a implementation of a ID system where each mailbox has an ID and processes can send messages to IDs instead of just Mailbox.Send. This is not easy, as local boxes will be able to access local memory, but remote mailboxes will not.

I would look at something like RPyC (http://rpyc.wikidot.com/) as it provides a protocol somewhat like you are looking for.

Basically the answer is 'no' there isn't really a good way to do this.