My tongue was of course firmly planted in my cheek (or worse). Framework no, endrun
yes.....
To quote the release from W3...
"Jon Bosak, Sun's Online Information Technology Architect (says) "XML represents a
key technical advance in web technology.. enables secure electronic commerce.....
Together XML and Java provide a platform- and vendor-independent environment that
liberates users from proprietary software and hardware architectures. Because it
advances document delivery as much as data exchange, XML will alter the competitive
landscape not only on the World Wide Web but in electronic and print publishing as
well." Jean Paoli, XML 1.0 specification Co-editor, and Weblications Product Unit
Manager at Microsoft Corporation, added: "This is a huge win... XML's use to
describe and interchange structured data ensures the rapid evolution of the Web."
The SGML and 'semantics' crowd have had a hard time recently with the success of
HTML and the success of objects-a-la-Java. Ignoring the documents vs objects and
documents as objects discussion on this list (at my peril), the real marketplace
appears to be doing a good job of deciding where things will go next (see deLanda's
stuff at http://netbase.t0.or.at/delanda/a-market.htm for a discussion of THAT).
But, to go from tongue in cheek to other shoe dropping, mindshare is obviously now
on the 'object' side.... we no longer have a fixation on getting unstructured
information like BLOBs into relational databases, but rather concerns about getting
structured data distributed by objects. Surely some progress???
I spend all my time with clients who just wanna make a buck (or a few billion in
some cases) out of all this churn. They have mixed bags of legacy legacy systems,
legacy client/server systems, three tier and ntier stuff and a commitment to
intranets, extranets and ecommerce. I know they NEED easy ways out and stuff like
XML probably provides it. But not as part of a conceptually consistent and
interesting long-term direction.
Much less framework.....
Sundar Narasimhan wrote:
> > XML seems to be the kind of break-thru mental framework that will allow
> > everyone else into the emerging world of distributed objects without undue
> > intellectual struggle... the short-term victory (once again) of syntax over
> > semantics.
> As another lurker -- can you tell me (or point me to) something
> halfway intelligible that might demonstrate why you think that XML is
> the framework for distributed objects? I'd like to ask, as an
> uninitiated one, "where's the connection"?