Ted Leung – whose weblog I just subscribed to a couple of weeks ago and I enjoy reading immensely – just commented on my blog about Adam Bosworth.
First off, I want to be clear that I wasn’t “taking Adam to task”. I was just honestly excited to see that he appeared to closing in on understanding the Web via the seemingly identical path that I took. I think you have to have had the “Web epiphany” before you can appreciate why this excites me so much. 8-)
Ted writes;
Cross off CORBA and replace it with either REST or web services. The Web is already there. The missing piece is OpenDoc or something like it.
I don’t dispute that the browser provides a relatively weak form of compound document framework when compared to OpenDoc and CommonPoint, but my emphasis at the time was in studying the architecture of the system to see if it prevented richer frameworks from being built by extension. And I discovered that no, it didn’t prevent this from happening, and in addition already had some of the architectural features that I felt were required (XML namespaces (well, they came later), serialization-centric (GET), binding of state to behaviour (Content-Type), etc..). And sure enough, we’re finally beginning to see some of these systems being developed now. So I wouldn’t say that we’re missing OpenDoc, I’d just say that we’re working with a primordial-but-extensible version of it.
BTW, I also discovered that just by historical accident, an important part of what I expected to see – client side containers – wasn’t there. Cookies really threw me for a loop for many months, and it wasn’t until I read Roy’s dissertation that I realized that he didn’t like cookies, and that the RESTful solution to the problem they addressed was also a perfectly compound-document-framework friendly solution.