Highly interactive web applications for tables and phones will dominate the web in the next generation. For server support of these applications, we’ve used our Hessian protocol experience to design a foundation for the next generation of service-oriented applications. To fully test its usability, we’ve used our messaging architecture for Resin’s own internal cloud messaging.

Because applications are best organized as a collection of services, our Hessian and JSON messages are routed to agents with a standard, familiar actor address, similar to email addresses. The actors can coordinate in a single JVM or across servers in a cluster.

The object-oriented messaging of HMTP and JSMP have learned from a long tradition of message-based systems, back to SmallTalk, Objective-C and Scala, and through earlier messaging protocols like XMPP. We’ve taken the best ideas from earlier designs and distilled them to a clean, compact system.