Web services

It is my understanding that Microsoft has dropped COM like a hot potato in
favor of Web Services for their future architecture.  How does Dolphin fit
with Web Services?

John

On 26 Oct 2004 12:46:54 EDT, John Keenan  
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> It is my understanding that Microsoft has dropped COM like a hot potato  
> in
> favor of Web Services for their future architecture.  How does Dolphin  
> fit
> with Web Services?

Dolphin Harbor (http://dolphinharbor.org) might help, but it seems to be  
down, maybe you can check deja news for Steve Waring's email and contact  
him.

--
Regards
HweeBoon
MotionObj

John,

> It is my understanding that Microsoft has dropped COM like a hot potato in
> favor of Web Services for their future architecture.  

They certainly gave that impression, but read about the "registry
redirector".  It, and the implicit 64 bit version of COM, are a lot of
work to include in a new OS for something that is headed for the
chopping block.  As Drudge would say, Developing...

Have a good one,

Bill

--
Wilhelm K. Schwab, Ph.D.
[hidden email]

John Keenan wrote:

> It is my understanding that Microsoft has dropped COM like a hot potato in
> favor of Web Services for their future architecture.

Seems implausible on the face of it, to me anyway. Do you have a reference ?

The reason I call it implausible is that I think COM and web-services lie at
very different levels of (architectural) granularity, so one cannot reasonably
replace the other.  Maybe that's what MS are talking about -- they may be
backing off from an attempt to push COM as a suitable component architecture
for assembling large-scale applications at the coarsest granularity.

It's hard to imagine every Active/X control turning into a little HTTP-server,
for example ;-)  (We'd run out of port numbers, for one thing...)

Just speculation, of course, I don't really know much about it.

> How does Dolphin fit with Web Services?

I'd say that components written in Dolphin would probably fit into a
web-services-based architecture rather more gracefully than into one that was
based of COM (or DCOM, or COM+, or whatever).  It's not that Dolphin has any
particular difficulty talking COM, but COM itself is ill-suited to such
integration.  The loose-coupling of web-services is designed to allow the kind
of architectural heterogeneity that you need to run a mixture of immiscible
execution models.  That said, MS will (are) undoubtedly succeed in concealing
the essential simplicity of the web-service architecture under a blanket of
acronyms, poorly thought-out system services, MS-standard API's, and God-knows
what else.  To what extent it'll be reasonable and feasible just to side-step
the mess and code down to the on-the-wire protocol in Smalltalk (presumably
with the help of packages like Steve's) rather than try to build on the
MS-supplied stuff /though/ Dolphin, I don't know.

    -- chris