Re: HTTP extension
Owen Rees (rtor@ansa.co.uk)
Tue, 07 Mar 1995 16:48:23 +0000
belaidi@prof.esigetel.fr writes:
> Hi,
>
> Has any one heard about the extension of HTTP to a full distributed
> object-oriented system?
>
> I need information about this subject.
The extensibility of HTTP is one of the issues we are exploring, but it is not
clear that an extended HTTP will make a good distributed object invocation
protocol. One issue is that objects can have arbitrary sets of methods, and
may not have any that match the HTTP basic methods, so adding methods at this
level may be the wrong way to address the problem. The other ways to extend
HTTP also seem to lead to similar problems.
Another issue is that the invocation protocol is only a small part of a
distributed object-oriented system. There are many other issues such as
naming, resource discovery, dependability, security etc. This is only one of
the WWW-related groups that have areas of common interest with distributed
object-oriented systems.
Several groups, including us (ANSA), are working on various kinds of
interoperability between HTTP and CORBA. We have an experiment in which CORBA
clients and servers interact using HTTP as the RPC protocol in such a way
that, for simple types, conventional forms and CGI scripts can interoperate
with the CORBA parts. One of my colleagues gave a presentation on this to our
technical committee recently, the abstract is at <URL:http://www.ansa.co.uk/pha
se3-doc-root/approved/APM.1419.01.html>, but the presentation itself, and the
code of the prototype, are available only to our sponsors.
Gordon Irlam has a page <URL:http://www.base.com/gordoni/web/distribution.html>
with pointers to relevant resources.
Regards,
Owen Rees <rtor@ansa.co.uk>
Information about ANSA is at <URL:http://www.ansa.co.uk/>.