Re:The Rise and Fall of CORBA (2006)
by hyperpallium on Monday September 14, 2015 @03:43PM
(#10217039)
Do you find recursive types are needed in practice, for RPC? JSON lacks references (so it's an object tree, not a graph), but that hasn't stopped adoption...
What's a "dynamic operator" in this context?
---
> The first RPC was great and CORBA came and went, following this the perception was that it was utterly unsuitable for anything, until perhaps the introduction of ProtoBufs, Thift, JSON-RPC and so on. I personally think it can be incredibly useful, but deciding on just the right features to keep things manageable is incredibly difficult (more so than the tech itself I believe).
[from your grandparent comment] Yes, there's something in this space, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. Historically (there's pre-OOP papers on this), making the network invisible seemed really cool (still does!), but then all the Network Fallacies (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computin...) got you. I think we've made real progress in general, e.g. JS programmers use async callbacks routinely, and there's promises; http is about dealing with the network. Not only is the tech worked out, but, perhaps more importantly, many coders are familiar with it. Whereas CORBA's superficial design defects (confusing API) obscured its fundamental design defects (distributed objects).
> trade-off between expression and usability - and for now JSON seems to have found pretty good sweet spot. Perhaps with just a simple schema layer on top that will be suitable for most use-cases.
What's a "dynamic operator" in this context?
---
> The first RPC was great and CORBA came and went, following this the perception was that it was utterly unsuitable for anything, until perhaps the introduction of ProtoBufs, Thift, JSON-RPC and so on. I personally think it can be incredibly useful, but deciding on just the right features to keep things manageable is incredibly difficult (more so than the tech itself I believe).
[from your grandparent comment] Yes, there's something in this space, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. Historically (there's pre-OOP papers on this), making the network invisible seemed really cool (still does!), but then all the Network Fallacies (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computin...) got you. I think we've made real progress in general, e.g. JS programmers use async callbacks routinely, and there's promises; http is about dealing with the network. Not only is the tech worked out, but, perhaps more importantly, many coders are familiar with it. Whereas CORBA's superficial design defects (confusing API) obscured its fundamental design defects (distributed objects).
> trade-off between expression and usability - and for now JSON seems to have found pretty good sweet spot. Perhaps with just a simple schema layer on top that will be suitable for most use-cases.
Good summary!