- From: Joshua Allen <joshuaa@microsoft.com>
- Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2003 12:44:47 -0700
- To: "Tim Bray" <tbray@textuality.com>, "Champion, Mike" <Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com>
- Cc: <www-tag@w3.org>
> We disagree profoundly. In my career I saw many ambitious API-centric > attempts at smooth network interoperability prove to have lousy > cost-effectiveness, including various RPC stacks, Corba, DCOM, and so > on and so on. The Web succeeded in many arenas where they failed, and > one important reason is that it never subscribed to the myth of the > interoperable data model. If the Webarch doc is not to be used to Whoa! Are you getting confused about what people mean by "data model"? RPC/DCOM interop was all about shared marshalling formats, and shared interface definitions -- not about shared data models. Nobody in the DCOM/Corba/RPC worlds deals with things at the data model level. As an example of an "interoperable data model", think of the relational data model. The existence of the relational data model means that I can learn SQL and use any of a number of great database engines. The existence of relational data model means that I can convert my code from using SQL Server to use MySQL with no code changes necessary -- regardless of which programming language or API (ODBC, JDBC, OLEDB) I chose to use. The benefits of a shared data model in the case of relational are completely undisputable. And the benefits of a shared semistructured data model are already evident in enabling deployment of XPath, and will soon be far more evident in deployment of XQuery.
Received on Friday, 24 October 2003 15:44:49 UTC