Approaching 10 years ago (gasp!), a group of us on the distributed objects mailing list used to think ahead to what the world would look like once the “plumbing wars” were over; that is, once the planet agreed on an infrastructure which could facilitate ad-hoc, loosely coupled, machine-to-machine integration between untrusted parties over the Internet.
Thinking back on that just now, with nearly 10 years of additional experience under my belt, a couple of interesting observations can be made.
The first is that we all seemingly made this implicit assumption that the planet would just agree in unison; that something would be developed and everybody would instantly know that this was it, then immediately get to work on building the fun stuff on top.
The second observation is that back in 1996, this infrastructure of our dreams had already been deployed! It was, of course, the Web, right under our noses the whole time, and moreover, built atop a distributed object model. Oh, the irony!
Of course, it’s abundantly clear now that not only will everybody not agree in unison, but that a large chunk of the industry never even gave the Web serious consideration as such a platform.
Who knew?
no comment until now