It's Like Déjà Vu All Over Again
"You could probably waste an entire day on the preceding links alone. But why take chances? We also give you Paul Snively..." — John Wiseman, lemonodor
Web services: Winer on WSDL. Winer's claim that WSDL was invented in such a way that it will only work in Java and .Net environments and "can't work in a dynamic environment; it's a static interface," didn't go unnoticed. Sjoerd tries to explain.
Others think WSDL is the way of the future. We'll see.
By thw way, the other day someone wanted me to explain how XML-RPC is different than CORBA. I managed to say something, but it made XML-RPC and SOAP seem so uninteresting... Is there some online explanation that makes this comparison, and explains why web services should be interesting (from a theoretical, not economical, point of view)? Something like that may come handy next time I am asked about this sutff
To the extent that WSDL is isomorphic to any other IDL implementation it is doing what I've been saying it's been doing all along: recapitulating CORBA. XML-RPC and SOAP <—> IIOP, WSDL <—> IDL, UDDI <—> CosNaming/InterfaceRepository. Getting dynamic languages supported by CORBA basically involved adding the Dynamic Skeleton Interface (DSI), Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII), and dynAny type.
But using Squeak as a first language? Now that's courage. I was stoned for even proposing such mainstream languages as Haskell and Scheme. I can just hear them: "Squeak? What's Squeak? Oh. It's Smalltalk? Well Java is better isn't it?"
It'd be nice not to have the "first language" debate again. Instead we should discuss how to aid students in understanding programming as a unified discipline, subsuming most or all of the major paradigms: imperative, object-oriented, functional, logical, concurrent, constraint-based... to that end, I highly recommend that people follow and/or teach from <http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.pdf>. A .ps version or .ps.gz version can also be found at the same location. The text uses the multiparadigm language Oz and its environment, Mozart. Highly recommended.
9:46:32 AM