Inter-programing language AND inter-server communication?

Question

Are there protocols/solutions/messaging system that allows me to communicate between languages AND servers?

Eg. I want to be able to communicate between one server running Java (or Ruby, Python etc) on the backend and one server running Javascript also on the backend.

The solution I use now is HTTP REST.

Are there other solutions that is standard way of communicating between servers with different languages?

It doesn't have to be web related.

Answer 1

There are many.

Data formats:

• JSON
• XML
• Any custom text or binary format that doesn't rely on types available in one language

Protocols:

• HTTP / REST
• SOAP
• XML-RPC
• And of course TCP, IP, UDP, sockets, etc are not programming language specific either

And many more

Answer 2

There are many. Outside of http based protocols you have for example CORBA and RPC for procedure-call style communications and DDS, AMQP and some others for message-passing style communications. There are also many proprietary systems like ICE (procedure-call) and Tibco Rendezvous (message-passing).

Answer 3

For the moment, I use ZeroMQ with JSON/BSON (if the codec exists). ZeroMQ is still in heavy development, but it has the potential to become a very important piece of software technology.