Distributed Objects

10.4 Distributed Objects

Much of the philosophy and functionality goals of HTTP-NG borrow heavily from structured, object-oriented, distributed-objects systems such as CORBA and DCOM. Distributed-objects systems can help with extensibility and feature functionality.

A community of researchers has been arguing for a convergence between HTTP and more sophisticated distributed-objects systems since 1996. For more information about the merits of a distributed-objects paradigm for the Web, check out the early paper from Xerox PARC entitled "Migrating the Web Toward Distributed Objects" (ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/misc/webilu.html).

The ambitious philosophy of unifying the Web and distributed objects created resistance to HTTP-NG's adoption in some communities. Some past distributed-objects systems suffered from heavyweight implementation and formal complexity. The HTTP-NG project team attempted to address some of these concerns in the requirements.