The Protocol [was: Syntax] is API Fallacy

[Ingargiola, Tito]

Hi,

[JonathonBorden states:]

>     This isn't the problem with RPC systems at all (including CORBA, Java
> RMI, DCOM, DCE-RPC etc), and certainly the current defacto web 'protocol'
> namely a form and www-form-encoding or a CGI query string is hardly a
> robust
> way for programs to communicate. Rather, the ubiquity of firewalls allows
> HTTP and SMTP traffic to flow where no RPC can go.
> 
This seems a hard argument to make given that popular corba implementations
which support firewalls via tunneling techniques have been around for a
number of years, yet have not had much impact on corba's (lack of)
popularity.  The reason that http & friends have had the impact corba had
hoped for has to do primarily with the fact that they're simple
("web-weasels" don't typically write CORBA servers); other reasons include
ubiquity, performance and tools (emacs, vi, or notepad all work pretty well
along with one of the many free, stable httpds available to anyone).  

[JonathonBorden states:]
>     That's exactly my point, there is no reason not to layer IDL on top of
> perfectly good protocols such as HTTP and SMTP. There is no reason not to
> use perfectly good standards such as MIME. 
> 
Certainly this can be done, but one has to wonder why one wants to do it.
I've played extensively with manipulating DOM structures remotely via CORBA
(see http://www.objdev.org/index.html for some details) and the bottom line
is that the granularity of the DOM is inappropriate for significant use in a
distributed system.  You're better off in nearly all cases simply firing a
stream of XML at whoever needs it.  

I think that one could happily integrate all sorts of wonderful XML-derived
benefits into a CORBA environment by having both stream and remote
invocation interfaces (I'm working on such a system now).  However,
"layering" CORBA on top  of XML will prove to yield little of value except a
reminder of how precious performance really is ;->

Regards,

	Tito.


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