I think AJAX and WebApps will be a nice way in the future to
develope software.

But what I am currently missing in AJAX is a nice way for
invoking functionality on the backend server side.

All the new stuff like JSON-RPC, WSDL/SOAP, XML-RPC is missing
the point, much too complex and not feasable for real distributed
applications. And at most they are just re-inventing the wheel
with all the pitfalls in distributed programming: No type safety,
missing language mappings, no well defined runtimes etc.

I am very familiar with CORBA and so I know it is not an option
here, too (firewalls, NAT-Traversal, Security etc., you name it).

But I think ICE would fit nice into this new paradigm (or may
be not so new paradigm) as a solution for remote procedure
calling.

But some parts seem to be missing.

To use ICE from a browser with JavaScript, one would need
an http transport, so you can use the XmlHttpRequest-Object
for the transport on the browser side.

Did anybody try to develope such a beast?

On the other hand a language mapping for JavaScript would
be needed and of course a corresponding SLICE-Compiler.

And last but not least an ICE-Runtime in JavaScript is needed
that could use the XmlHttpRequest-Object.

My Idea here is to develope something like Glacier but
with an http-Server on the client-side. It would just transport
the ICE-Serialized Data in the bodies of the Http-Request and
-Responses and forward them as normal TCP streams to the
backend servers (like glacier does as far as I understood the
concept of its architecture).

For the server callbacks the JavaScript client would invoke
a special Http-Request which just polls (ie. waits) for server
callbacks which are marshalled in the body of the response
to the polling http-request.

What do you think about this idea? Is it just too stupid? Or is it
an interesting option to do RPC in AJAX? Or is it too hard to go
that way?

Thanx in advance for any opinions or hints on the subject.

P.S.: Forgive me my spelling erros. English is not my native
language.