I thought I’d read everything Dan Connolly had ever written about the Web, but this gem (found via via del.icio.us) apparently evaded my radar. He’d written other notes on Web & OO, but those weren’t as easy to digest as this one. Here’s the first paragraph;

I must take this opportunity to dispell a myth that is all to pervasive in the scientific and product literature surrounding the Web: that distributed objects are something that can be, or some day will be, added to the Web. Distributed objects are the very heart of the Web, and have been since its invention.

Right back at ya, Dan.

Repeat after me; the Semantic Web is sloppily extensible.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

I must have done something right in Chiba, because I’ve been asked back as co-chair of the developers track of WWW 2006.

There’s no longer a developer’s day, just a track, like any other. It’s a very welcome change from my POV.

Jeremy Carroll is the other chair.

“HTTP over XML”?! WTF?!
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
My Uncle is in Egypt right now, counselling the Britons that survived the bombing.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

An excellent piece from Ryan Tomayko at lesscode.org about grokking the Web. A couple of comments in particular, caught my eye;

The great majority of experience with systems was not had with the constraints of the web in place. This makes conclusions drawn from observation of existing working systems, as well as recommendations based on them, extremely unreliable.

And quoting Adam Bosworth

How did the web happen? People take it for granted. You just assume that there’s always been the web. You know, in the beginning there was the web and the web was good and so on but that actually isn’t true.

Indeed-y-do.

Ryan also graciously lists me amoungst those who understand the situation he describes, and makes this observation about my email address;

Mark Baker’s username is always distobj (Distributed Object) because he was a big CORBA head.

True, initially. I picked that moniker in ’95, IIRC, when I was the local CORBA guru at, what was at the time, the largest publically under development CORBA project. But I continue to use it not because of momentum, nor because I’m still a fan of CORBA (I’m not, if you wondered 8-), but because I see the World Wide Web as the uber distributed object system that I’ve been looking for since my university days. I just had to squint a little to see it (and though the purist distributed object view works 99% of the time, it has gotten me into trouble on occasion).

Best of luck to Graham as he departs webMethods and starts a new venture
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
Kurt pushes the Atom/RSS vs. SOAP meme. *nailed*
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
Good principles of design span domain; constraints are your friend
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
“call.setDoREST(true);”. Heh. 8-)
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]