DRb: how to check if remote object exists?

Question

I've been toying around with DRb to use as my solution to communicate across multiple processes. I'm using the stardard process: one creates a service, registers it to a druby uri, and on the other process a DRbObject is created referencing that URI. So far so good. Let's say I kill the first process. Every subsequent method call on the remote object will culminate in a ECONNRefused exception. Which is only fair. But isn't there a way to see if the DRbObject is indeed registered in the given URI? I think testing it by forcing a ECONNRefused on every instance start to see if it exists is a bit silly.

Of course, other solutions involving resources other than DRb are always welcome, provided they indeed represent a plus.

Answer 1

You should check out ZeroMQ. It is somewhat more complex to set up than DRb but it handles all the presence/reconnection issues mostly transparently.

Answer 2

This may not be what you are looking for, but I have developed an IPC framework on top of DRb that hides all of the DRb stuff from the applications level. This includes client methods to find whatever services have registered with the server across the network. Probably too much overhead for you but maybe worth poking around in it. Anyway, you can check it out on Github.