On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 10:36:26AM -0700, Ken North wrote:
> Rich Salz wrote:
> > appreciated if you've lived through other bridges:
> > com/corba
> 
> That's the first answer that comes to mind.
> 
> The COM versus CORBA debates produced a desire for a platform-neutral solution,
> and we'd already seen the demonstrated interoperability of TCP/IP and HTTP.

A story I sometimes tell...

Suppose you work at a large bank, and are tasked with implementing
Internet Banking.  The main accounts database uses a database that
runs on an IBM mainframe, so IBM's message queueing software comes
to mind... the Web site uses a Sun Solaris system... and so you go
to the COBOL and IBM Assembly teams and ask them to implement your
CORBA IDL spec...  they look at you blankly... so you take another
tack and ask them for a report generator that puts pointy brackets
around each field, and they smile happily and say "six weeks". :-)

This oversimplification represents just part of why xml-rpc caught
on so fast; I'll leave it to others to go further.

It's about impedance matching.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/