Sure thing. The SIMPL toolkit provides a QNX style Send/Receive/Reply messaging library. At its core it exchanges messages using shared memory with fifo's (named pipes) for synchronization. A SIMPL application consists of two or more interacting SIMPL modules. Those modules can be written in any number of supported languages including C, C++, JAVA, Python, Tcl/Tk or PHP. More importantly modules written in different languages can be mixed in any given SIMPL application. To enable network wide transport of messages SIMPL uses the concept of surrogates. Surrogates are themselves SIMPL modules, but are totally generic and simply act to relay messages across network links like TCP/IP and RS232. The surrogates themselves have embedded protocols for communication across surrogate pairs. The surrogate protocol of most interest to Arduino developers is called the tclSurrogate protocol for historic reasons: it was first used to enable Tcl/Tk applets to become SIMPL modules (http://www.icanprogram.com/simpl/tclSurrogate.html). The tclSurrogate protocol essentially allows a SIMPL module to be split into two parts: a generic Linux hosted part and a nonLinux embedded business logic part.
Once the tclSurrogate protocol is enabled on the Arduino, developers would only need to write the embedded business logic part and connect the Arduino into a Linux network.
Porting the tclSurrogate protocol to an Arduino would make a great student project. The SIMPL project team is willing to offer whatever testing support might be required for such an endeavor. We have access to a Linode at http://icanprogram.ca which can be used as the Linux portion of such tests.
