From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Wed Mar 15 2000 - 18:58:25 PST
On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, Jeff Bone wrote:
> With HTTP, you've got a generic request-response system --- i.e.,
> message passing. Message passing is provably sufficient for
> anything computable. But wait, there's more! With "servers" on both
> ends, you can have callbacks, so you can do asynchronous stuff.
> With XML and something like XML-RPC, you've got a typed RPC
> mechanism and on-the-wire object format. You want objects? Fine,
> build an interface repository and reflection on top of that. Need
> events, building a peer-to-peer buddy list? Bidirectional HTTP
> operations on specified interfaces, clients as HTTP microservers,
> and switchboard semantics implemented as a Web application.
I'd like to propose the even more universal and flexible
request-response system:
send() and recv()
New and improved with new buzzwords! Thanks to psychic design techniques
these two functions are fully compatable with HTTP, XML, and objects! It
slices it dices! It chops and mashes! It even makes your Java in the
morning!
You can dress it up all you want, it's just data being stuffed over a
network. [HTTP|RPC|XML|FTP|SMTP] is just a fancy but limited wrapper for
send(). But they are all limited becasue they were designed for a
specific purpose. Why does everyone think HTTPD is the holy grail?
Does noone remember it's just a hack of the gopher protocol?
*ARG*
- Adam L. Beberg
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
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