[6952] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Deployment of CCI
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (leo@aimtech.com)
Tue Dec 6 12:58:06 1994
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 1994 18:20:27 +0100
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: leo@aimtech.mv.com
From: leo@aimtech.mv.com (leo@aimtech.com)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
[ Brandon Plewe, plewe@acsu.buffalo.edu, writes: ]
> I definitely agree that the componentware approach to tommorow's WWW
> software is the way to go. Let me give you a couple more examples that
> make this infinitely better than what the monolithic browser model can
> handle. Once the HTTP (and other protocol)-communication code is
> separated into an independent object, it can be integrated into _any_
> software that supports the respective object model. Thus, a word
> processor could retrieve documents via HTTP, Gopher, or FTP just as
> easily as retrieving them from the local hard disk or LAN
>
> [ more great examples ]
>
> In this model, today's NetScape or Mosaic would be a "federation" (in
> the Swiss sense) of the following modules:
> HTTP transport
> Gopher transport
> NNTP transport
> WAIS transport
> FTP transport
> Local file I/O
> Printer control
> HTML parser
> Gopher menu parser
> GIF/JPEG/XPM/etc parsers
> Document Manager
Yea Brandon! We make multimedia authoring systems and would like
to incorporate some of these modules too. We need HTTP transport and
a HTML parser. We would like to license these modules but will probably
have to build them ourselves. Modules are the way to go!
> Now that I've given all that ideal, I must ask that we not reinvent the
> wheel by developing a new object sharing model (at least nothing more
> complex than CCI). We are not the only ones moving toward componentware,
> and models abound. I firmly believe that we should rely on emerging
> industry standards such as CORBA and OpenDoc (see the May 1994 Byte for
> a good introduction to this concept and the coming standards), which
> should have all the power we need.
It would be nice to have a cross platform standard today but we don't. Who
wants to work on a Windows OCX solution today? CORBA and OpenDoc next
year?
Leo A. Lucas
AimTech Corporation
