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Re: MS thinks HTTP Needs Replacing???

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: MS thinks HTTP Needs Replacing???
• From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2002 00:06:56 -0500
• In-reply-to: <E16gaD3-00024N-00@s...>

There's an intriguing post on the REST list from Jeff Bone on this 
issue:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/823

"In the process of buying into the OO religion, we failed to learn an 
important lesson: OO rarely works as a large-scale integration 
methodology. Generic interfaces and generic composition frameworks have 
always demonstrated better scalability, reusablility, simplicity, 
economics, etc. than OO. Cases in point: UNIX, Plan 9, the Web, Linda. 
Until we as an industry learn the lessons these examples pose, we're 
doomed to fail over and over again, developing technologies that cannot 
withstand the test of time and ubiquity: ONC and DCE RPC, CORBA, DCOM, 
etc."

I'm not sure exactly what "Generic interfaces and generic composition 
frameworks" refers to, but I'm thinking that this goes quite a bit 
beyond REST vs RPC and into some fairly profound issues of software 
architecture. Has the OO paradigm really hit the wall, at least as a 
meta-model for widely distributed applications?  If so, what's the 
alternative?  

I also note the convergence between Andy Gray announcing a new version 
of Ruple a few posts back, and Jeff Bone mentioning the Web and Linda as 
architectures that *do* scale.   Ruple is essentially a melding of the 
Web, Linda, and XML.... and as near as I can tell is consistent with 
REST principles, using essentially PUT, GET, and TAKE (=GET+DELETE) as 
its primitive operations.  Are we seeing the outlines of a new meta-
model for large scale software architecture that challenges a lot of the 
received wisdom of the OO paradigm? 

That is, perhaps "encapsulation" of data is not such a good thing after 
all ... or at least it's not scaling well to the Web. Perhaps it makes 
more sense to expose the data via generic operations rather than 
exchange objects that encapsulate data behind customized operations. I'm 
not sure, but things are getting interesting ....

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