[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

RE: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

• To: "'Alaric Snell'" <alaric@a...>, "'XML Dev'" <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: RE: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
• From: "Didier PH Martin" <martind@n...>
• Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2002 10:50:22 -0400
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <20020914232900.2F74D5542@c...>

Hi Alaric,

Alaric mentioned:
"Remember that the architecture people are solving problems that they
think 
they can solve, not problems which are useful to solve. Soap + WSDL may
be 
the Hot New Thing, but it doesn't really let you do anything you
couldn't do 
before using other technologies -- if you had a reason to. All that 
Distributed Services Nirvana the architecture astronauts are blathering
about 
was promised to us in the past, if we used DCOM, or JavaBeans, or OSF
DCE, or 
CORBA."

Didier replies:
This was also true more than 25 years ago when we demonstrated Xerox
dorado and stars workstations to some people (you probably know who :-).
Some where not seeing the difference between that and mainframe
terminals. In fact both were to be used for about the same things. At
first sight yes they were right. However, through usage, what we got
with these new autonomous machines and GUIs was on the qualitative level
and also more freedom ( I had not to wait for some mainframe's priest to
built applications). Idem for XML RPC or any other RPCs that the
community agree on. DCOM and CORBA were two islands. What was still
needed is a common marshaling format. For good or evil the community
picked XML as a framework to create a marshaling language. So this is
what is new then, a consensus about a common marshalling language, not
the functionality per se. 

It seems that once in a while I encounter the same reasoning I heard
behind my back when we where demonstrating Xerox workstations a couple
years ago. Reality has more then one dimension. Reductionism lead to the
same problems that architectural reasoning may lead to when badly used.

PS: CORBA and DCOM may still exist and an update to use a common
marshaling language is still possible you know. 

Cheers
Didier PH Martin

• References:
  • Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
    • From: Alaric Snell <alaric@a...>

• Prev by Date: Re: [Fwd: The problems with Xlink for integration langu ages]
• Next by Date: Re: [Fwd: The problems with Xlink for integration languages]
• Previous by thread: Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
• Next by thread: Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread