GRelay is a middleware networking and IPC communication layer written in C.

In its early days, MyNC used CORBA (particularly, omniORB) for communication, but it turned out that CORBA was not only an overkill, but it also was not directly suitable for what I wanted to acheive. At first, I patched omniORB slightly to add additional non-standard asynchronous communication capabilities. Although that worked, it seemed unwise to rely on a specific patch for a particular ORB. Seeking for a simple solution, I created GRelay.

The ideas behind GRelay are the following:

• The protocol should be as simple as possible.
• No restrictive policies regarding objects' nature and behavior.
• Simple tasks should require simple subsets of the middleware.

In GRelay, there is no object model as such, but rather a set of standard servers providing various object call semantics.

A textual protocol was chosen, so that in most cases it is even possible to make method calls by hand using telnet. It should also be pretty easy to implement simple subsets of the protocol in other languages.