DBus over the network; clustered machines acting as one; service discovery

[Avery Pennarun]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 10:39 PM, Shawn Rutledge
<shawn.t.rutledge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 7:14 PM, Avery Pennarun <apenwarr at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  One of the main reasons Corba is a mess is that it tries to be
>  >  completely general and network-transparent about everything.  Because
>
>  Well that's a very general statement.  :-)  In what areas do you think
>  it went too far?

There's an awesome (and old) research paper about this very topic that
ought to be required reading for people designing distributed systems.

http://research.sun.com/techrep/1994/smli_tr-94-29.pdf

Quote:
        Every ten years (approximately),
        members of the language camp notice that the number of
        distributed applications is relatively small. They look at
        the programming interfaces and decide that the problem is
        that the programming model is not close enough to whatever
        programming model is currently in vogue (messages
        in the 1970s [7], [8], procedure calls in the 1980s [9], [10],
        [11], and objects in the 1990s [1], [2]). A furious bout of
        language and protocol design takes place and a new distributed
        computing paradigm is announced that is compliant
        with the latest programming model. After several
        years, the percentage of distributed applications is discovered
        not to have increased significantly, and the cycle
        begins anew.

Note that this was before XML, Web 2.0, etc.  On the other hand, the
number of distributed applications has, er, increased significantly.
That probably makes the paper even *more* interesting to read again
now.

Have fun,

Avery