The Emerging Distributed Web

 It's *very* exciting to see such active interest in building standards to
support the emerging distributed Web!!!

 At Allaire, we've been working on reference implementations for all kinds
of XML middleware infrastructure.  About 18 months ago we released the WDDX
1.0 SDK into the public domain via Wddx.org, and have been building on this
ever since.  Since we released WDDX, we've had pretty much all of the major
language platforms add either native or 3rd party modules for WDDX (Perl,
Python, PHP, Java, JavaScript, ColdFusion, COM).

 We initially focused on the very pragmatic problem of a light-weight
data-type serialization/deserialization model, making WDDX suitable for a
variety of other applications (e.g. simple text persistence, including
storage of session info, caching, content object storage, simple meta-data
and config files), including those where the design of a custom DTD/Schema
and XML parsing would seem cumbersome to a developer.

 WDDX 1.0 has got great adoption as a reference implementation.  We've had
over 12,000 developers download the SDK, and it is cropping up everywhere as
a duct-tape for a variety of Web problems.  It is also a standard feature in
any shipping version of PHP4, Python, ColdFusion and JRun(servlets/jsp/ejb).
We expect to see a lot of broad, continued use over the next 18 months,
certainly.

 We were very happy with the simplicity of the 1.0 design, and have
experimented with a variety of distributed object and messaging
architectures on top of it.  We shipped a simple WDDX-RPC mechanism with
Allaire Spectra, our major new packaged system for Internet sites.  This
allows a customer to create a Site Object Model that can be a) persisted
easily to a hybrid object-relational XML database, and b) exposed via a
simple object-based request/response mechanism.  I'm sure we'll get a lot of
customer and developer feedback on what _more_ they want!

 We're also working on next-generation implementations of this, but as
general purpose infrastructure independent of the Spectra product-line.  We
expect to offer our work and ideas to the W3C and other consortsia, and
implement and release open source reference SDKs for everything we do on the
standards front.  Since the release of WDDX 1.0, we've made a lot of
progress on thinking about and implementing distributed objects, messaging,
content and services meta-data and other XML middleware services, and are
psyched to share this with the W3C as the next-generation Web is built!

 Regards,
 Jeremy Allaire
 Cambridge, MA

Received on Sunday, 5 March 2000 22:31:34 UTC