Disclaimer: the views expressed on this site do not nessecarily reflect those of my employer
Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Hugh Pyle and Phil Stanhope are stoked. Congratulations! I told you all it was going to get better. This is a major reason why. Awesome work guys.
PS: Phil, I'm going to have to come down there and get you to blog more about this project, though I totally understand why you didn't want to let it get in the way :)
Groove is implementing an LRPC model using SOAP. "Isn't that really inefficient?", they want to know. When I first started thinking about it I thought so too. But I was reminded that clean separation of interface from implementation has always been a big win for any large scale design I've been involved in. What we lose in efficiency we gain in consistency. And it turns out that parsing XML isn't slow - certainly not the bottleneck for us. We now have a single interface to program with Groove from the outside, and its a wonderful thing that the same application can work over localhost or over the GWSAP.
It was also around this same time that I started playing with
Radio, which is doing its http://127.0.0.1:5335 coolness. And it all started to make sense. The flexibilty that this concept provides is tremendous. Now, even on the same box, I can tell developers to use the language and toolkit of their choice.
Now imagine that lots of other application developers start doing the same thing. Suddenly we can all play together in a highly extensible network of connected apps. We can start doing neat stuff like callbacks. We don't have to worry if the application is a COM server, or uses a named pipe or DDE. We interoperate in a more loosely coupled environment and we can virtualize the location of our applications at the same time.
12:22:17 PM
Dave, thank you for the kind words. I'm so glad that I touched you in this way. It took me 17 years to write that web page. And its opened up so much for me. I realized that even though my mother is gone, our relationship is still intact. I hope you can find the strength you need right now.
