mike-spreitzer@acm.org
I am interested in two approaches to object-oriented WWW servers. Both stem from my involvement with the ILU project, which is a freely available generalized RPC system, roughly CORBA-compliant, but with greater emphasis on openness, extensibility, interoperability, and portability.
The first approach involves object-oriented extensions to HTTP servers. In addition to the ones mentioned in the workshop's call for participation, there was Digital Creations' ILU Requester extension for the Apache server; this extension allows the server to contact an already-running object-oriented service via, e.g., CORBA.
The second approach involves viewing HTTP as an object-oriented RPC protocol. The idea is to directly unify the WWW and object-oriented RPC. My ILU colleague Bill Janssen and I are involved in discussions with the W3C about HTTP-NG, and with the OMG about IIOP-NG, with the understanding that unity is to come out of these. The idea is that given a sufficiently well-designed IIOP-NG, HTTP-NG would amount to using a particular IDL interface (and your favorite extensions to it!) over IIOP-NG transport.
You can find a position paper from participation in a related workshop at WWW5 here.
If you haven't already, note the overlap between the concerns of this workshop and the inter-business vision of CommerceNet. (Here is a presentation from December '96.) They see the Net as enabling not just electronic businesses, but the ability to build new electronic businesses whose sole purpose is to add value to other existing businesses. This would be by doing things like searching, brokering, and aggregating. This requires program-usable data or metadata to be in common use.