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

Re: Hertzfeld on CGI and RPC

Author:Paul Snively
Posted:7/12/2000; 8:31:59 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 7/10/2000
Msg #:18482 (In response to 18480)
Prev/Next:18481 / 18483

Dave Winer: I understand that you liked the idea of Telescript. I didn't like it because it was so hyped and so closed. I hate shit like that. If I were in Andy's shoes (I'm not) I'd clear the air on that chapter of his career, esp if he wants respect in the open source world.

Yeah, Andy could kinda go "that was an experiment that didn't go so well," very similarly to how he's kinda left the Radius stuff behind him, doesn't even have that icon on his biz card anymore, etc. Heaven knows those of us who've dealt with him and respect him will continue to--perhaps even more so.

TeleScript was another one of those things that tried to solve the big problems, like security and accounting, and that's the rationale for being closed. Clearly that wouldn't work today, but I don't know that it was so clear at the time--I was talking to friends like Darin Adler and Scott Boyd about TeleScript before the first Netscape betas came out. The world hadn't yet decided that the Internet and TCP/IP had won. No one was concerned about RPC through firewalls because, outside major universities and huge corporations, there were no firewalls yet.

So one of the lessons, I think, in retrospect is that it's bad technology policy to tie what (RPC over the Internet) to how (a specific protocol over a specific transport) too closely. But then, that's easier to say given the past decade of software engineering wisdom than it was in 1990, too.

So leaving all that aside, I think there are some interesting questions, like: how easy/hard would it be to do an XML-RPC/SOAP-IIOP bridge? If the Eazel folks aren't interested in XML-RPC/SOAP (which, given that GNOME is CORBA-based, is entirely understandable), can we build the bridge? Do we want to?

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