CORBA's not boring yet. / XML in an OS?

Fri Feb 5 18:32:24 GMT 1999

If you have Netscape Navigator 4 on your machine, then IIOP runs on your machine.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-xml-dev at ic.ac.uk [mailto:owner-xml-dev at ic.ac.uk]On Behalf Of
Dave Winer
Sent: Friday, February 05, 1999 5:02 AM
To: xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Subject: RE: CORBA's not boring yet. / XML in an OS?

>>Isn't RPC using IIOP and DCOM already slow enough without using XML? Why
don't MS just support IIOP?

I don't know why MS does anything, I don't work there.

I know why I like XML-RPC. It's simple. You can write a client in a few
hours, and a server in a couple of days. A JavaScript programmer can learn
how to do it, today, in less than 24 hours, and in a few weeks, they'll be
able to do it in minutes. 

I have some theories about why this is true:

1. HTTP is everywhere. Does IIOP run on my machine? I'm pretty sure it
doesn't. And it's not just about Microsoft, I have Macs too.

2. XML looks like HTML. To someone who has mastered HTML the transition is
easy.

Performance matters, for sure. But sometimes people overlook that people
performance is probably the single most important limiting factor. I can
tell you this, CORBA wasn't designed for my mind. It's so complicated, so
many new concepts to understand. I even had trouble understanding HTML way
back when.

Wire protocols can be optimized, but people's brains move at their own
rate, rejecting things that appear too complicated, waiting for something
that makes sense to them. We're all busy! 

The problem with COM, CORBA and Apple Events is that each of them were
invented before the web exploded and are quite platform specific, and are
not understandable to people who do web development.

Dave

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