Most Linux based distributions come pre-installed with DBus, which is a language-independent way of IPC on such systems. DBus is great and have been extensively used for a long-time. It, however is written largely to be used on a single client computer, where apps running locally are able to talk to each other. It could be used over TCP, however it may not be suitable for reasons I state below.
In modern times and especially with the advent of smartphones, many new app communication paradigms have appeared. With IoT being the new cool kid in town, its becoming more and more a “required” when different apps running in a premise have to “talk” to each other. DBus daemon can be accessed over TCP, however a client running in a web browser cannot talk to it because browsers no longer provide direct access to the TCP socket, so writing a DBus client library won’t be possible. For Android and iOS, talking to a DBus daemon running on a PC would need new implementations.
Much of the above effort could be reduced if we used a more general purpose protocol, that supports PubSub and RPCs, is secure (supports end to end encryption), cross-platform and have an ever increasing client libraries ecosystem. WAMP protocol is one such protocol, it can be run over WebSocket, allowing “free” browser support. It also runs over RawSocket (custom framing atop TCP). In principle, WAMP could run on any bi-directional and reliable transport hence the future prospects of the protocol look quite good.
To that effort I have been working on a pet project for the last couple of months, called DeskConn. It uses Crossbar as WAMP router (equivalent: DBus daemon) and couple with it an authentication scheme and service discovery using python zerconf, allowing for the daemon running on the desktop/RPi to be discover-able by Clients on the local network (WiFi, LAN or other interfaces).
With the network layer figured, writing applications on top that is pretty straightforward and can be done with very little code. I’ll come up with some example code in different programming languages in a later blogpost. For the curious, the umbrella deskconn project has quite a few sub-projects to be run on different environment https://github.com/deskconn/
Note: I am a Core developer at Crossbar.io GmbH, the company that funds the development of Crossbar (the router) and a few WAMP client library implementations in Java, Python, JS/Node and C++, under the Autobahn project. I am the maintainer of autobahn-java and autobahn-js. DeskConn is a personal project that I have been working on in my free time.
A more wider list of implementations mostly done by the community could be seen here https://crossbar.io/about/Supported-Languages
Omer's Blog 