Subject: Re: C++, can we develop collaborative software tools?
From: Dave Love, d.love at dl.ac.uk
Date: 10 Feb 1994 20:03:27 GMT
In article <D.LOVE.94Feb10200327 at dlpx1.dl.ac.uk> Dave Love,
d.love at dl.ac.uk writes:
>>>>>> "Jeffrey" == Jeffrey J Barbose <barbose at netcom.com> writes:
>> Jeffrey> If we're going to do collaborative work, two things are needed:
>> Jeffrey> 1) A colloborative infrastructure that is a system service.
> Jeffrey> Apple's AOCE is one example.
>> Jeffrey> 2) An object system that is independent of the platform's
> Jeffrey> and the development system's binaries, and can work over
> Jeffrey> networks of any kind (from LocalTalk workgroups to internet
> Jeffrey> TCP/IP WANs). Examples of this are IBM's SOMobjects, the
> Jeffrey> OpenDoc standard, and Sun's DOE. Think OMG. Think CORBA.
>>IMHO the barriers to collaborative software development are
>socio/political rather than technical. (There is no silver bullet.)
>Why is an `object system' of this kind vital?
Whatever the barriers may be, either socio-political as you say, all the
way down to big-endian vs little-endian byte-ordering on the data,
there's a problem to be solved, the complexity of which is not manageable
without benefit of object technology.
At this point, it's easier to rise above such barriers rather than
knocking them all down.
The analogy is this: rising above barriers means using technology that
doesn't care about the underlying implementations...such as SOMObjects,
OpenDoc and CORBA/OMG.
Attempts to knock down existing barriers would be, say, to insist that
everyone use DOS or UNIX.
And I'll tell ya...I think the barriers need to be overcome, but I sure
as h*ll am NOT going to drop the latest-and-greatest that Macintosh or
any other platform has to offer just so I can diddle text files for the
purposes of exchanging data.
More objectively put: we can have our cake and eat it too.
Jeff
