Distributed Object Systems (was Re: VNC Server)
Marcel Weiher
marcel at metaobject.com
Wed Apr 19 08:44:06 UTC 2000
> From: "Lex Spoon" <lex at cc.gatech.edu>
> However, there's a strong intuition that there is an easy
generalization
> here: just make remote object references behave like local ones. The
> problem is, unfortunately, that it doesn't work when you look at the
> next level of details. Well, *I* think it doesn't work, and others
> disagree. :)
I think the way it would/could/does work is to make both local
messaging and remote messaging special cases of "generic messaging".
In fact, one could very well argue that current Smalltalk messaging
*is* just a specialization of "generic messaging", and I think that
this might be where the people who claim that "it's all really the
same" might be coming from.
Practically, I think it might be useful to build a remote messaging
system based on the assumption that it is the same and then see what
doesn't quite fit. After that, (re-)introduce generic messaging to
cover the commonalities and handle the differences by specializing.
> By the way, the paper that someone recommended at Sun is very good:
>
>
http://www.sun.com/research/technical-reports/1994/abstract-29.html
I have only skimmed it, but the fact that there are differences
shouldn't be used as an excuse to mask the similarities and introduce
gratuitous/unecessary differences/complications.
Marcel
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