mortb said:
Does anyone know of some article explaining the term marshalling?
Marshalling is inter-process data wrangling. When you want to move
data from one process to another, no matter where it is (different
machine, different processor, different network, etc), you use
technology like COM or CORBA or SOAP to get the data from point A to
point B.
That's marshalling. To do it right you have to have a contract between
the sender and the receiver which defines how the data is described.
With COM, that means publishing interfaces on both ends, and the
VARIANT data type takes care of marshalling the obvious cases, like
strings and single-precision floating point numbers. With .NET/SOAP,
you can do that or let the data describe itself, with its neat little
built-in reflection stuff.
HTH,
Rob
