Web services and CORBA

(one more subject change)

On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 04:19:49PM -0400, Anne Thomas Manes wrote:
> I agree with you that we're trying to reinvent CORBA on the Web.

Thanks for saying that.  I like seeing a spade being called a spade.

> But this
> time we want to do it in a loosely coupled fashion that can tolerate immense
> scalability, latency, and even intermittent connectivity. (Something that
> you simply can't do with CORBA.) Looking back at the CORBA process, creating
> IIOP was the easy part, even though it took years to achieve consensus and
> to then make it interoperable. The hard part was designing the higher-order
> CORBAservices that address transactions, security, etc. These high order
> services never reached the point of pervasiveness and interoperability.
> (Security has been particularly disappointing.)
> 
> Fortunately we're not trying to reinvent IIOP. We want to build this new
> distributed computing infrastructure based on an immensely scalable network
> that automatically manages really hard things like partial failures, network
> transparency, etc. But we still need to build those gnarly high-order
> services -- and we want to do it in such a way that they're interoperable
> from the beginning.
> 
> I really think that the Web and XML can allows us to be successful this
> time.

To me "the Web and XML" is where I invoke GET on a URI and get some XML
representing the state of some resource, or PUT or POST some XML in
order to change the state of some resource.

I agree that we want to extend the Web to do things like reliability,
transactions, conversations, etc..  I just think that what most people
are using SOAP for, is not that.  It's changing the way the Web works
(putting the method name in the POST body, rather than using HTTP's
methods), and then building the extensions on top of that changed thing.
SOAP actually has a use, that I worked hard on in the XMLP WG, that
allows it to be used in this manner.

What would be wrong with building reliability, transactions,
conversations, etc.. in the context of hypertext?  Wouldn't that be
more Web-like?  Wouldn't that be closer to what our charter suggests
we do?  Wouldn't that reuse more of what made the Web successful?

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               distobj@acm.org
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com

Received on Monday, 27 May 2002 16:35:15 UTC