KOALATALK An ICE-based light-weight Message Bus Koalatalk is a Message Bus system, inspired from Tooltalk. It allows several heterogeneous (i.e. spread over different machines) clients to communicate with each other in a transparent and yet efficient way. It is a direct successor to Koalabus, created when Tooltalk hadn't yet emerged as the leading standard. Koalatalk stems directly from both our work on Koalabus and a close Tooltalk analysis. Koalatalk is internally based on X11R6' ICE (Inter Client Exchange) library to ease the low-level work over TCP. Its API is rather small (less than fifty func tions) and provides most of Tooltalk services. As an added value with respect to Tooltalk, it allows direct communication between clients, with almost no loss of performance (which is usually the case with this kind of system since messages generally have to go through the Message Passer before reaching their destination). -- end of abstract More specifically, Koalatalk is built atop ICE and provides services which you might find useful for your rendezvous considerations. The article is being locally reviewed and will be submitted within a week to the X Consortium. I will put it on ftp shortly. Koalatalk itself can be freely obtained at /anonymous@avahi.inria.fr:/pub/KoalaTalk/koalatalk.tar.gz You can also consult the documentation directly from my HTML home page (see signature). Let me know if you feel you have any interest in our work... -- Cedric BEUST, Bull Research Koala project click here