samedi 1 octobre 2005

Faassen, on Eby, on Jim, on object publishing Martijn's weblog thanked Phillip Eby for pointing out the credit that Jim Fulton deserves for coming up, quite a number of years ago, with ideas that are now being touted widely as revolutionary. Thanks, Phillip, for the kind words and digging up some delightful prehistoric artifacts. You're right that Jim deserves tons more credit for object publishing, and that we missed the boat in not explaining it more widely. You're also right that IPC 5 was where Jim was pressed into service. That page shows that I was scheduled to give the CGI presentation. I, though, wanted to go to France with my wife. [wink] So I asked Jim, who had been with our company for around 2 weeks, to give my presentation. Your recounting is accurate: he hadn't done CGI before and he wrote the essentials of object publishing on the plane ride back. It's one of those neat, under-understood anecdotes rich in both humor and importance. There's also some interesting history before that. At IPC 3, I gave a CGI tutorial, attended by some guys from a company called eShop in the tutorial. One of them was this neat guy named Greg Stein. I showed something called the ILU Requestor (props for this go to Rob Head and Brian Lloyd), which eShop subsequently added to their e-commerce product. An e-commerce product which subsequently became Microsoft's SiteServer when eShop was bought. (I wrote a W3C tech note afterwards on the ILU Requestor.) When Jim arrived and immediately produced the idea of transparently traversing and calling Python objects, we immediately dropped the ILU Requestor and became devoteees of "object publishing". Last year I was thinking that, after all this time, most packages haven't caught up to what Jim had on his laptop after the plane ride back. So many systems seem more like the "Gateway" in CGI, than systems which adopt the object model of the web. I suppose the rise of dynamic languages in the mainstream has now made this idea more realistic. Though many have heard the story, I'll repeat it here for completeness. Why the name Bobo? Doesn't that mean something, err, stupid in other languages? Indeed, the story is that Jim wanted to release it just before the Python conference where he demo'd it. We needed a name and I procrastinated. The deadline arrived and I needed a temporary name. I chose something so ridiculous that we'd be forced to come back and give it a proper, adult-sounding name. Years later, when Bobo and Principia got married to produce Zope, we had to retire the name Bobo. There was a segment of the community that was sad to see an irreverent, non-adult name being passing out of service. 3:23:43 PM   comment []