DOMC 1996 Overview Report.

I Find Karma (adam@cs.caltech.edu)
Thu, 12 Sep 96 00:25:27 PDT


Rohit ---

I scrapped almost everything Ora sent you in favor of writing my own
high level overview. Ora skipped four of the six sessions and was way
too detailed in the 2 sessions he did cover. Feel free to edit this as
needed.

You know, it occurs to me as I write this that it doesn't sound nearly
so convoluted from an overview perspective as it actually was from a
participatory perspective. Is that always the case?

:) Adam

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
DOMC 1996 Workshop Summary

W3C/OMG Workshop on Distributed Objects and Mobile Code

Boston, Massachusetts, June 24-25, 1996
Adam Rifkin, Caltech

Internet technologies (especially the World Wide Web) and object technologies (especially distributed objects) comprise the core of the next generation of applications planned by the software industry. There is a great deal of common ground between these two areas. DOMC 1996 provided a forum for the "cross-fertilization" of ideas between people building web services and people using CORBA. Authors of the best of 64 position papers participated in sessions, in an effort to capture "what can Web people learn from ORB technologies." Please see the DOMC 1996 Accepted Position Paper Page for a list of participants.

The workshop was organized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Object Management Group (OMG). The workshop's format consisted of six relevant topic presentations (with each respective speaker introducing key questions in the topic), and break-out group meetings focusing on some aspect of the presented topic and its relevant questions.

The six topics were:

  1. Web Object Types (presented by Dan Connolly, W3C).
  2. Applets and Agents (presented by Guido van Rossum, CNRI).
  3. Digital Libraries (presented by Andreas Paepcke, Stanford).
  4. Wire Protocols and Binding (presented by Bill Janssen, Xerox).
  5. Future of CGI (presented by Jim Fulton, Digital Creations).
  6. Directory Services and Trading (presented by Andrew Herbert, APM).

The World Wide Web represents a global, small standard for networked information retrieval. The goal of DOMC 1996 was to take steps toward developing a global, small standard for networked distributed objects and mobile code.

Web Object Types (Dan Connolly, W3C)

Connolly based his presentation on slides by Philippe Merle on integrating CORBA objects into the Web. Key questions in this area include:

Three break-out sessions focused on the following issues:

Applets & Agents (Guido van Rossum, CNRI)

Rossum first talked about agent implementation languages (NB: Rossum is the principal architect of the Python language), including Python, CAML, Java and Tcl. He stressed the importance of defining the word "agent", and suggested the word "mobile agent" for this context.

Three break-out sessions focused on the following issues: