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[Gavin Nicol]

>> Quite. I think we can model these objects in a number of ways
>> though. I would personally like to define the objects in IDL
>> *and* SGML... (for information on IDL etc. look at www.omg.org).
>
>So, are you saying, in terms of a grove/grove plan and the 
>implementing objects/IDL?  That looks ideal.

Yes.

>CORBA is a nice open spec.  Last time I looked, the documents 
>cost big bucks, but maybe that has changed. 

If you complain enough, they'll send you them free ;-) Also,
if you pull down OpenDoc, you get SOM, which is based on it,
and you get IDL docs. If anyone needs the IDL spec, I also
have it.

>What would be the alternatives to CORBA? What would be the strengths
>of CORBA? 

ILU maybe. The benefit of using IDL or ILU is that they are language
*and* platform independent. Also, they both have free programs that
generate JAVA/C++/C stubs. They also have free object instantiation
libraries available. I prefer IDL simply because it's closer to a
standard. 

>It is hard to get around the Wintel quasi-monopoly on the 
>low end.  To be successful, I think one should not try.

Sure. The important point (which I tried but failed to make 2 years
ago to a group of developers) is that you can wrap OLE in CORBA (a la
OpenDoc), but it's very hard to go the other way!

>How would you view this architecturally?  How does 
>the parser API work with the rest of the system?
>For example, a major concern for adopting XML and 
>in fact, most Internet technologies into intranet 
>apps is object identification and addressing. 

Right. That's why I brought up the though of specifying a name
resolution API as well (entity management). You need both to do
anything meaningful.

In an ideal world, you don't really need an entity manager,
but it's a little early for such radical concepts yet... another year
or two, and the WWW will evolve as it should, and we'll be set.


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