xml-dev - RE: XML over HTTP: SOAP and ...?

["Didier PH Martin" <martind@netfolder.com>]

Hi Anders,

Anders said:
However if you want a distributed object/computing environment then XML+HTTP
is definitely not enough, you need much more. Something similar to Corba or
DCOM
is needed..

And I have already noticed on XML-RPC list that someone asked for generators
that generates code for marshaling XML_RPC/SOAP messages. Well, that no news
for
Corba and DCOM.

Didier replies:
And what if SOAP Xml files would be generated from an IDL file? What if the
next DCOM package would include SOAP marshalling? In fact, a format like
SOAP using HTTP for transport is simply a marshalling mechanism between
objects.

We can get a good overview of what HTTP marshalling could be with the ILU
package (freely available form Xerox), ILU allows marshalling over HTTP.
Each function call is an HTTP get method and the other object responds
thought the usual HTTP mechanism. If you use the ILU IDL (CORBA) compiler,
you can generate marshalling code in Python, Lisp, C, C++, Java. I
successfully created in Didier's labs, a small network of distributed
servers. I got several objects to communicate together. One was written in
Java, an other in C++ and an other in Python. All the objects where created
from the same corba IDL and the IDL compiler generated the marshalling code
for all the objects. The objects, where then transformed into HTTP servers
and HTTP transport was used in the experiment to have all these objects to
talk together. I even pushed the zeal to have one of the servers out of the
firewall and it worked (off coursed I used HTTP for transport and the
firewall was set to let HTTP pass through).

For the curious of this world here is the link to the ILU project:
ftp://parcftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html

Cheers
Didier PH Martin
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