What’s the Point I
There is a “philosophy/architecture” called building “Portals to X”
- This is equivalent to building a complete customizable environment for X in terms of a web client interface and an “object web” middleware
There are distributed object technologies to label register and look up objects
- CORBA, COM, Java WIDL (XML)
There is a language Java which is more productive than previous languages such as Fortran or C++
- It is currently language of choice for all middleware -- whatever object model
- Java Grande at http://www.javagrande.org is a community activity to encourage use of Java in “real computing” and recommend/lobby the necessary changes in Java infrastructure
- In around 2 years Java will achieve numerical performance similar to Fortran
There is a data structure metalanguage called XML which allows universal object serialization and the generation of application specific data specifications