Monday, October 22, 2007

Sweet Slides: The Web: Distributed Objects Realized!

OOPSLA 2007 The Web: Distributed Objects Realized! (Stu Charlton and Mark Baker)

Good paper(s) too:

REST is clearly not the "end of history" with regards to network-based software architecture. At smaller scales, with somewhat different desirable properties, other styles, such as Remote Data Access, or Event Based Integration, continue to solve important organizational and technological challenges. Beyond the current iteration of the Web, future requirements will require a re-evaluation of REST's constraints and desirable properties for a new set of requirements. This may lead to relaxing some of REST's constraints, or an introduction of new constraints (Extending REST for Decentralized Systems). Regardless of the direction this may take, a continued means to successful future systems architecture will be the discipline of objectively evaluating constraints, and the properties they induce, for the new generation of global scale, networked-based software systems.

Via Stefan Tilkov

Update fixed broken link to presentation. Also added this image as it caught my eye:

I distinctly remember the "Object Web" phase of distributed computing. I remember being a participant in it. I bought into CORBA. I remember saying things in 1998 like, "we need more - we can't be constrained to HTTP GET and POST in the browser. We need to be able to bust a socket and talk to an ORB for a richer experience" I was kinda clueless then. At least I had a lot of company - everybody including Lotus Domino which I was integrating with when I made that comment was busily adding CORBA capabilities to there whos-its and whats-its. Well everybody besides MSFT and friends, but that is a different story.

Almost 10 years later, we still just have GET and POST in the browser, but XHTML 5 will eventually fix that. It turns out you can get pretty far with just GET and POST. You can get even farther by just discarding distributed object / RPC technology all together and using the REST uniform interface.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Much like Van Hagar, you can have the best of both worlds. One time, at unemployment camp, I wrote JMS implementation on top of HTTP.