| Architecture Domain
Object Technology and the Web
This is an investigation of the integration of distributed object technologies
with the web, and the duality between application programmer interfaces (APIs)
and network protocols.
This investigation recently (July 97) culminated in the lauch of
a new W3C Architecture Domain Activity:
HTTP-NG - The Next
Generation.
The power of the Web as a new medium derives not only from its ability to
allow people to communicate across vast distances and different times, but
also from the ability of machines to help people communicate and manage
information. The Web is a complex distributed system, and Object Technology
has been an important part of managing the complexity of the Web from its
creation.
Object Technology continues to influence and impact the web in a number of
areas:
-
Scripting
-
Client side scripting has been an interesting area of research and
experimentation since the early days of the web,
but now it being deployed, and information providers need interoperable support.
See also: Document Object Model
and HTML with scripting markup.
-
Embedded Multimedia Components
-
The web is a natural medium for component software technology such as Plug-Ins,
Java applets, ActiveX controls, OpenDoc parts. See also:
Inserting Objects into HTML.
-
Web Server Components
-
CGI, along with HTML and forms, is an important part of the platform of
technologies used to deploy application services on the web. But its design
presents a performance limitation in many situations. A
number of mechanisms for interfacing applications
to web servers, from C-callable APIs to network protocols to distributed
objects gateways have sprung up to fill the need. Check out
Jigsaw and its servlet support.
-
Agents and Mobile Code
-
Mobile code can be used to automate information access: searching, brokering,
and even manipulating data with mobile agents is an interesting trend.
The various players in the distributed objects are separated into camps based
on architectural interoperability, and listed in chronological order (roughly).
-
DCE
-
OSF is the controlling body. The distributed
object model inherits from something called TI-RPC, which is C++ish. The
RPC system came from Apollo, I think.
-
CORBA
-
Common Object Request Broker Architecture.
from OMG, The Object Management Group. Related/derived work:
COM
Microsoft's Component Object Model -- the underpinnings of ActiveX, DCOM,
and OLE.
Plan 9
This is the basis of Inferno. The Bell
labs guys started over with the "everything is a file" concept. 9P is a really
nifty protocol. Supports union links.
Research Notebook: Misc.
These resources have been bookmarked for further study.
Dan Connolly
$Date: 1997/10/02 14:06:57 $