Also, obviously, he's obviously very very biased towards Java.....
Though Java is my language of preference (by far), I don't think it can (or
should) solve everything. For example, I see EJB's as a major failure in
the future... EJB's and JNDI try to do a lot of things that HTTP does much
better....
R
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt Jensen" <mattj@newsblip.com>
To: "Rohit Khare" <Rohit@knownow.com>
Cc: <FoRK@xent.com>; <iroth@knownow.com>; <aytek@knownow.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2001 2:58 PM
Subject: Re: Bill Joy kicks around XML for fun :-)
> On Sun, 25 Feb 2001, Rohit Khare wrote:
>
> > BJ doesn't get it.
>
> It could be because, if the transcript is accurate, Bill's too busy
> thinking of what he's going to say next to let the interviewer finish his
> sentences :-)
>
> -Matt Jensen
> NewsBlip.com
> Seattle
>
>
> > =================================================================
> > O'Reilly: So what do you think about .NET?
> >
> > Joy: I don't know, they had to do something. It's imperial
> > overstretch. It's just way too much. It's a top-down design, where
> > they weren't even clear - the problem is they need a strategy, not
> > ... the goal is total world domination and they invented something
> > really complicated and messy.
> >
> > O'Reilly: So SOAP and XML-RPC - things like that - are in some sense
> > relatively simple. Do you see them ...
> >
> > Joy: But Java and linking together the data types solves this
> > component service composition model using programming language
> > technology. XML doesn't because it's still just data. You still have
> > to have a type system to plug the things together and essentially,
> > dynamic linking, and you don't find that in XML just by itself. So
> > you need Java and you essentially need what Jini does - whether
> > you're hooked together with Jini RPC or an XML-formatted RPC is
> > really kind of irrelevant. You still need the moral equivalent of
> > dynamic linking if you're to have rich things that connect to each
> > other. People will eventually realize that you need to do something
> > like Jini.
> >
> > O'Reilly: I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that. On the other
> > hand, I would argue that from a pragmatic point of view, systems that
> > don't have all the features often beat systems that do. You know the
> > Web was sort of ...
> >
> > Joy: Well, but either you can compose components with behavior or you
> > can't. It's like the evolution of multi-cellular creatures. You can
> > go along with single-cell organisms but at some point you will come
> > up with a multi-cellular body plan. And you either can do it or you
> > can't. And the problem is that without the ability to plug together
> > behavior, you're basically stuck in these single cellular things. You
> > end up with 1,000 different XML-based thingies that don't ever really
> > compose to do anything together. You don't have composable things
> > because you don't have the algebra to put things together.
> >
> > I think WAP is an example of a similar problem. Why did WAP fail?
> > Because it's boring, and it's boring because it's static, because it
> > didn't have any behavior. The screen is small and there's no way to
> > really do much of anything dynamic. And so what you needed is
> > downloadable behavior. You need basically a scripting language or
> > Java or something in the handset to make it interesting.
> >
> > I think a similar problem here is XML. Yeah, you can do a few little
> > things, but you're going to quickly run into the fact that you need
> > behavior, not just data formats, because otherwise everything is too
> > static and brittle. As long as there's no alternative, it's fine, but
> > then you quickly discover things get to be kind of messy.
> >
> > O'Reilly: I'm not sure I agree with you there. I think you can in fact
...
> >
> > Joy: I know. The market doesn't agree with me, either. We'll come
> > back in five years and find out.
> >
> > O'Reilly: Well, but is it really either-or? There really isn't ...
> >
> > Joy: Yes, I think ultimately these data-driven things will prove to
> > be unsatisfactory. If anything, what we need is procedural component
> > things plugging together using a more biological metaphor rather than
> > -- Java is an engineered connection and what we really would like is
> > some sort of constraint-based list-like connection which is, you
> > know, rather difficult. We really wanted something that's beyond the
> > state of the art, even goes beyond Java to do things in a much more
> > organic-biological kind of way.
> >
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:18:32 PDT