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Collaborative articulation of how abstraction and language is employed in the computational manifestation of numbers -- including analysis of the role of syntax, semantics, and meaning in the specification and use of software interfaces.
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2004-06-14"External" Interface Contracts"External" Interface ContractsDon Box's Spoutlet: Objects as Web Services Again and Again and Again. Don Box clarifies something that has always puzzled me. When I first saw COM in 1992, it was clear to me that the interface approach had great legs, being a simple, versatile approach to plug-and-play dynamic configuration of components. That is not the path that was taken to .NET and I couldn't figure out why, unless it was because developers couldn't see the point of being restricted to interface contracts (and persisted in thinking that COM was too hard). Here Don seems to confirm that it was indeed out of a "the customer is always right" approach, quoting Steve Vinoski. I subscribe to the notion that the customer is always right. I don't think that is entirely what happened here. I think what happened is that the model was changed to be object- (rather than interface-) centric for other reasons, including comprehensibility in the context of Visual Basic. I suppose there was no thought to an exit plan at that point, and I also suspect that there was not enough exploration of how to preserve the component model and deal with the customer's concerns. I wonder if, just maybe, there was too much listening to the customer from the solution space, and not the problem space. (I love that distinction.) Meanwhile, Steve Vinoski's "Objects as Web Services, Again," is important to our little Numbering Peano agenda. Of greatest concern to me is Steve's cautionary observation, "in my experience, preaching about the correct way to do things back then wasn't 100% effective, and so I don't hold much hope for preaching about it these days either." With regard to the problem of allowing objects to be directly exposed as services, Steve has a telling point:As long as toolkits and standards continue to target the development of web services in languages like Java, C++, and C#, this problem will continue to exist, due to the general mismatch of the abstractions involved. [my emphasis -dh:]What I think we can contribute here is recognition that there is a mismatch of abstractions and that it matters. The mismatch is more profound, I am thinking, than simply between programming-language objects and middleware (CORBA or COM) objects.
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