[link|http://news.com.com/2100-1046_3-5148148.html?tag=nefd_top|http://news.com.com/...html?tag=nefd_top]

Box said programs will use managed services based on the Extensible Markup Language to communicate with each other. Box is leading the work on the "plumbing" part of Longhorn, called "Indigo," which is effectively the successor to Microsoft .Net and as such will dictate how programs are written in future Windows platforms.

Moving developers away from the object-oriented world is a key element of Microsoft's battle for mindshare with the likes of IBM, Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, Oracle and other rivals that sell products based on the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) standard.
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Here we go again. There are two kinds of people in the world - object people and document processing people. The document people seem to be gaining momentum again despite the relative lack of managability of that approach.

To be fair, he seems to be talking about "distributed" objects - which never really worked. Nevermind that MS has never implemented a real object in their life. But this is a pretty misleading article sure to be misinterpreted by some clueless software manager.

In practice is not that easy - but this has more to do with the C++ influence that was going around at the time. Using one of the static languages you have to write idl (which looks a lot like C++), then generate proxies and stubs and implementations. All that code generation for each interface....

Of course, from a dynamic language like Objective C or Smalltalk - you have just one proxy that handles all remote objects and you let the interfaces be autoconfigured.

From the Wikipedia:

PDO became somewhat infamous in the mid-90's when NeXT staff took to writing in solutions to various CORBA magazine articles in a few lines of code, whereas the original article would fill several pages. Even though using PDO required the installation of a considerable amount of supporting code (Obj-C and the libraries), PDO applications were nevertheless considerably smaller than similar CORBA solutions, typically about 1/2 to 1/3rd the size.

Example Server:

/* Assume serverObject has a valid value of an object to be vended. */
NSConnection *theConnection;theConnection = [NSConnection defaultConnection];
[theConnection setRootObject:serverObject];
if ([theConnection registerName:@"server"] == NO)
{ /* Handle error. */}

Example Client:

id theProxy;
theProxy = [[NSConnection rootProxyForConnectionWithRegisteredName:@"server" host:nil] retain];
[theProxy setProtocolForProxy:@protocol(ServerProtocol)];
// interact with proxy like a local object

That's it. No idl, no fiddling with interface repositories, no Blanchard's Law violating code generation.