Mozart.NET

[Simon Beaumont]

"Bob Calco" <bobcalco at alltel.net> wrote in message
news:001301c38d9c$af052370$d81616ac at bcalcolt...

[tight coupling issues elided]

> Another, simpler, "loosly coupled" option is to create an application
server
> for Oz that will let you create functors as "Web services" which are
> basically components, only they communicate with their clients via SOAP
over
> HTTP - also not exactly the most efficient means, but it avoids all the
> gnarley COM issues and the even gnarlier CLR issues. Moreover it preserves
> Oz semantics and gives people a meaningful alternative to J2EE and .NET on
> the middle tier and on any platform... an idea I expressed on this list
> awhile back.

This is what say the jboss folks mean by .NET - loose coupling via soap
(they indeed bundle Axis with jboss to achieve this). I am very interested
in being able to use Mozart-Oz in middleware and the equivalent project -
Axis for Mozart-Oz as it were - would be well worth the effort - it's not
very glamourous work though and there are loads of issues outstanding even
in Axis (e.g. session management and security are very important for robust
webservice implementations) we could learn a lot from the Axis effort.

I was never a great fan of SOAP/webservices in principle (being an old
cynic) but my recent experience had changed by mind - with some compression
(and does SOAP shrink!) - our current applications scale very well over slow
WAN and  fast LAN's but we have quite a complex systems architecture to
achieve this - (Apache on the front handling the HTTP compression and SSL -
Tomcat/AXIS doing plain HTTP in the next layer...). I guess if we could
achieve at least what the Axis guys have done we'd be cooking with gas. But
we'd need the equivalent of tomcat (servlet + session management) at least
and then the soap bit could be integrated similarly (in fact the easier bit
from a design point of view)

I could put some professional time into this since I have a strong desire to
use moz in our middleware - the first step would be to do a survey of just
what we already have in terms of  HTTP and sevlet style session managment
opportunities - then we could estimate the effort and architecture required.
If we got it right we could have a very serious new application server -
given moz's distirbution and computation (space) architecture - this would
give us .NET+JavaSpaces+J2EE and a distirbuted store! Wow... business plan
anyone ;-)

Simon


______________________________
Director of Software Engineering
BioWisdom Ltd.
simon.beaumont at biowisdom.com
www.biowisdom.com



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