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by James Robertson.
Original Post: MS to Objects: "Drop Dead"
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Box said technologies such as Java's Remote Method Invocation (RMI) and CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) all suffered similar problems. "The metaphor of objects as a primary distribution media is flawed. CORBA started out with wonderful intentions, but by the time they were done, they fell into the same object pit as COM."
The problem with most distributed object technologies, Box said, is that programs require particular class files or .jar files (referring to Java), or .dll files (Microsoft's own dynamic linked libraries). "We didn't have (a) true arms-length relationship between programs," Box said. "We were putting on an appearance that we did, but the programs had far more intimacy with each other than anyone felt comfortable with."
"How do we discourage unwanted intimacy?" he asked. "The metaphor we're going to use for integrating programs (on Indigo) is service orientation. I can only interact by sending and receiving messages. Message-based (communications) gives more flexibility
I guess Don didn't get the memo - OO is all about the messages between the objects, and less about the actual objects themselves. Look at that last sentence - "Message based communications" gives more flexibility? What does he think a OO is about? You know, CORBA can be simple - in VisualWorks, it's amazingly, astoundingly simple. It takes a curly brace language like Java or C# to make it complex (at the developer level - I'm not talking implementation layer here).
What I really love is how people like Don seem to think XML is magic. Send a document, problem solved. Well guess what? You send a document, it gets parsed - and stuff happens. Whether you call it sending a message or not, passing a document is not discernibly different from making a remote API call with a document as the argument. So what if I use http as the transport? It's somehow magical now that I'm using a text based protocol? If this is what passes for "expert" in this industry, then we all have a problem. MS' direction - if Box is being accurately quoted - is along these lines:
"blah blah blah and then a miracle occurs blah blah"
The miracle is transmitting an xml document, apparently. Bah. Box needs to go read some of the things Alan Kay wrote as long as 20 years ago. He's decided to rename all the operations, and thinks that somehow that will create magic. Bah.
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