Re: Web RPCs Considered Harmful

"Wesley M. Felter" wrote:

> On Fri, 12 May 2000, Edd Dumbill wrote:
>
> > Although you point out that data transfer protocols have the opportunity
> > of avoiding lock-in, I'm not sure it's an API vs data transfer thing.
> > I can't see that it's any more difficult to obfuscate a data format than
> > an API.
>
> I don't see obfuscation as being the problem. I'm more concerned about RPC
> interfaces which are fully published, but can't map onto other
> implementations than the initial one. Consider an interface that requires
> every object to be manipulated to have some unique numeric ID; a system
> that doesn't assign numeric IDs to its objects is going to need massive
> kludges to implement such an interface.

This a major differentiator between protocols, the concept of instance/state
vs
pure RPC/stateless. There is also another issue lurking here and that is how
the instance id's should be extressed and transferred.

IMO there doesnt exist any *super* protocol which can handle all protocol
use cases so its back to basics again: let the requirements and use cases
determine which protocol characteristics are needed.

/anders
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/  Anders W. Tell                     /
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Received on Saturday, 13 May 2000 09:17:40 UTC