Re: Reflective systems

I'm jumping into this in the middle, so may be missing something, but I
would concur with the assessment that one primary disadvantage that binary
RPC mechanisms have is their inate inability to be self-descriptive. The
IDispatch mechanism works effectively if you have an IDL, but if you don't
then you're basically stuck in the dark about the characteristics of an
object (especially, as with many scripting interfaces, the core object only
acts as a proxy mechanism). The power of XML is not only that you can have a
descriptive interface, but you can in fact have any number of them - XSD,
RDF, WSDL, XTM, depending upon your requirements, and you can also utilize
multiple interface descriptors simultaneously.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Baker" <distobj@acm.org>
To: "Rich Salz" <rsalz@zolera.com>
Cc: "Williams Stuart" <skw@hplb.hpl.hp.com>; <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, February 04, 2002 3:06 PM
Subject: Reflective systems


> >
> > > Absolutely true.  The wonderful thing about the Web is that this is
done
> > > *with* the Web.  It can describe itself.  RPC cannot.
> >
> > I disagree. Adding RDF to the web and saying it's reflexive seems no
> > different from adding DII to Corba, IDispatch to COM, etc.
>
> I don't know about IDispatch, but IIRC, DII did not reify interfaces as
> first class objects (i.e. they didn't get OIDs).
>
> Also, while that's necessary, it's not sufficient.  What's also needed
> is a uniform means of resolving an identifer.  Neither CORBA nor COM
> has that, but the Web has GET.
>
> MB
> --
> Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
> Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
> http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 5 February 2002 02:12:21 UTC