WWW: Beyond the Basics

19. World Wide Web and Object Technology

by Ashish B. Shah

ABSTRACT

The World Wide Web is essentially, a large distributed system based on client/server computing. As of now it's document-centric and provides little support for connecting interactive services, or for interacting with "intelligent content." Recently there has been a lot of focus on applying distributed object technology to make the WWW more interactive and to turn Web documents into compound documents with active multimedia content.

Some of the efforts underway to enable interoperability between the WWW and distributed object systems are based on the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standards. Others include the Distributed Component Object Model that was recently announced by Microsoft, and a set of new APIs announced by JavaSoft for building distributed object-based applications in Java.

Compound documents can support many different data types and provide a uniform interface to each type. The Object Management Group has adopted the OpenDoc specification as a compound document standard. Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) which is based on the Component Object Model (COM) is also a competing compound document standard. Sun has recently announced the Java Beans API which promises to provide an platform independent component model for building distributed object systems on the WWW.

In this chapter we attempt to provide an introduction to the aforementioned technologies for integrating distributed objects technology with the WWW and try to compare and contrast them. We also provide a short introduction to currently evolving technologies such as ActiveX and Arabica.

CHAPTER CONTENT

  1. Introduction
    1. Current status of WWW technology
    2. Identifying and defining key technologies
    3. What can object technology do for the WWW?
  2. Paradigms for distributed computing and mobile code
    1. CORBA
    2. Java
    3. Distributed COM
    4. Comparing paradigms
  3. Compound document architectures
    1. OpenDoc
    2. Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)
    3. Java Beans
    4. Who will win the battle?
  4. Putting it all together
    1. Integration of technologies
    2. Current implementations and developments
    3. Future architectures
  5. Conclusion

References

 
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Copyright © 1996 Ashish B. Shah, All Rights Reserved.

Ashish B. Shah <ashish@csgrad.cs.vt.edu>
Last modified: Tue Oct 29 11:59:59 1996