Re: Distributed Objects overkill?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Tuesday, November 4, 2003, at 05:39 AM, Alex Perez wrote:

> This article was posted to Apple's cocoa-dev mailing list. Perhaps 
> someone here would care to clarify for the folks there why this is or 
> is not possible, and if the "laziness" is really the issue, as the 
> poster claims. Here is a chance to fight the FUD.

I can't see anything in the quote about 'laziness' ... but the 
statements about NeXTs DO may well be correct ... I've never heard 
otherwise, and I see no reason why endianness should be a problem.  
Perhaps word size might be a problem in the NeXT code ... I don't think 
they ever did portable DO for a 64-bit processor.  However, there were 
some very good people at NeXT, and it wouldn't surprise me if they had 
allowed for communications between machines with different word sizes 
too.

The stuff about different protocols and archive format/content is 
certainly correct.  NeXT/Apples protocol and format were (and as far as 
I know still are) proprietory and undocumented and would have to be 
reverse engineered.  A few people have volunteered to try to do that in 
the past ... and given up.  Think about how many years it took people 
to come up with good filters to read ms-word documents!

> On Nov 3, 2003, at 7:08 AM, Public Look wrote:
>
> > There has never been an issue with NeXT's distributed objects and 
> > endianness as far as I know.
> >
> > NeXT's DO certainly worked seamlessly between
> > Openstep Mach on 68000
> > Openstep Intel
> > Openstep Enterprise/PDO running on top of Windows NT on Intel
> > Openstep Mach SPARC
> > Openstep running on top of Solaris SPARC
> > Openstep running on top of HP-UX on PA-RISC
> > I have foggy memories of possibly using NeXT's "Portable Distributed 
> > Objects" (PDO) on DEC Alpha.
> >
> > The protocol deals with endianess internally.  It probably just 
> > standardizes on one endian convention and automatically converts from 
> > the wrong one.
> >
> > What has NEVER worked in distributed object between Openstep and 
> > Gnustep.  GNUstep uses slightly different protocols and more 
> > importantly, the systems archive objects differently.  DO between 
> > Openstep/Cocoa and GNUstep definitely does NOT work unless something 
> > has changed in the last year or so.
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> --
> Alex Perez
> aperez@student.santarosa.edu
> "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat 
> it."
> --Thomas Jefferson
>
>
>
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