Robert Findlay reports that SIMPL, a one year old open source effort to bring QNX style message passing tools to Linux, is beginning to show results in a number of real world Linux based applications.

SIMPL, an acronym for Synchronous Interprocess Messaging Project for Linux, espouses the mission to bring “the powerful QNX Send/Receive/Reply messaging paradigm” to the open source movement. According to SIMPL documents, the QNX messaging scheme is “an intuitive and simple to understand, yet immensely powerful, way of designing distributed software applications.”

Looking back at the project's first year, SIMPL project leader Findlay outlines SIMPL's key achievements as follows:

• A very stable fifo-based library which implements Send/Receive/Reply and performs within an order of magnitude of QNX on the same machine.
  
• A stable kernel-based QNX porting library which has been used to port some extensive QNX applications to Linux. In some cases this kernel library has been shown to perform within a factor of 2 of QNX on the same machine.
  
• Some extensive linkages to Tcl/Tk for the purpose of bringing a
  proven GUI system into the SIMPL world. This Tcl/Tk work extends not only
  to stand alone Tcl/Tk processes but to web based tclets as well.
  
• Source code for some extensive real world examples including the “softwareICs” and the extensions to RTLinux.

Another milestone for the project is the moving of its source code to the LGPL open source license. “SIMPL has always been completely open source and free for any use, including commercial purposes,” says Findlay. “However, now that the project is beginning to mature and the code base is growing ever more stable, we have decided to adopt the more formal license structure of LGPL.”

What's next? “As with any open source project there remains much to be done before we can match the powerful toolset we set out to replicate,” says Findlay. “The key is active participation by interested developers and we most certainly welcome any of those.”

For further information, visit the SIMPL project website, at: www.holoweb.net/~simpl.

Related story:
SIMPL: Synchronous Interprocess Messaging Project for Linux

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.