Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Two Wishlist Items and jarring my thoughts

Author:Dan Lyke
Posted:11/10/1998; 2:00:09 PM
Topic:First message
Msg #:293 (In response to 291)
Prev/Next:292 / 294

Re: "I think a scripting API is more than a way to store scripts."

Absolutely agreed. But in the Un*x tradition I'm looking for ways to tie a bunch of separate apps together, 'cause not reinventing wheels is what Un*x does best. There's already a DAV module for Apache, so that seems like a perfect solution to the storage part of the problem. And if we can get DAV entrenched now we have a chance to keep it a standard.

XML-RPC only seems incrementally better than many options (albeit with a substantial data overhead and missing named parameters, although I can't find the DTD right now to confirm that), whence my skepticism. On the other hand like all good standards it's as easy to implement as any alternative, and unlike CGI tightens down the requirements on return values a bit.

But I think what Dave is really hinting at is COM on Linux. At its stripped down core (the object factory and the IUnknown interface) COM is really a nice little API, and I'm under the impression that there are OSS efforts in that direction (probably every coder who's used DSOs or DLLs has implemented some subset in one project or another). How those fare in the face of the alternatives is unknown.

In a way the release of the Halloween documents is kind of a shame, although it only confirms what we already knew about Microsoft (the stated intention to decommoditize DAV is a little scary, but expected), it's contributing to a schism which may cause the OSS community to abandon technologies which actually aren't bad simply because Microsoft has expressed an interest in them.



There are responses to this message:

This page was archived on 6/13/2001; 4:45:48 PM.

© Copyright 1998-2001 UserLand Software, Inc.