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On Tuesday 12 February 2002 17:31, you wrote:
> Alaric Snell wrote:
> > On Tuesday 12 February 2002 17:00, Paul Prescod wrote:
> > > An RPC interface does not have this property. At best Google can return
> > > a hyperlink to an end-point and human readable documentation about how
> > > you could write a Python program to access the data behind that link.
> >
> > That depends what kind of RPC interface it is. RPC interfaces designed
> > for distributed use, rather than in tightly defined systems, need not
> > have that property.
>
> Can you point me to an RPC interface where a robot can, without knowing
> the methods, walk through the data and find other RPCs and, without
> knowing any methods, walk through the data and find RPC and, ....
CORBA. If the server ORB is set up to do so, IIRC, you can ask it for the IDL
(IDL ~= schema) of a given IOR (IOR ~= URL). Then you can call every method
that has no arguments and returns something containing other IORs - for
methods with no arguments are equivelant to HTTP GET-able URLs. And you can
tell from the type declaration whether a method will return any other IORs at
all, so avoid spidering method results that aren't going to contain any
further links.
[ONC RPC]
> Wonderful. How do I get at the *data objects* hidden behind the RPC
> protocol? The component end-point is the least interesting thing on the
> entire system. It is only an interface to the data and processes but as
> you describe it, it is an interface that is in the way.
Not everything is a data object :-)
> > What is the URI of me? http://www.alaric-snell.com/ is the URI of an HTML
> > page about me, not *me*.
>
> It is if you say it is and the rest of us agree.
But it cannot capture *me*. What operations can be performed upon Alaric
Snell? GET does not apply to me. I am not representable as a string of bits.
I do not have a MIME type.
Ok, I lie: http://rfc.net/rfc1437.html
> Paul Prescod
ABS
--
Alaric B. Snell
http://www.alaric-snell.com/ http://RFC.net/ http://www.warhead.org.uk/
Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software
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