On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Axelrod, Benjamin <baxelrod@irobot.com> wrote:
> 3.      It seems like part of the answer is some sort of standard interface
> (or a standard interface to determine what the actual interface to that node
> is).  Any ideas on this?

We are planning on working on interfaces in the future, basically a
machine-readable specification that can either be used to initialize a
node, or to interact with a node.

> 4.      Is there anything more elegant that a bunch of eval() statements (to
> turn string names into message types)?

roslib.message.get_message_class('std_msgs/String')

FYI: this method is unstable/internal and will probably be moved elsewhere.