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===CollaborativeWebObjects
===

Given the explosion of XML on the web and the rapid adoption of web
services architectures (including UDDI and WSDL support) for enterprise
services it is safe to assume true web object infrastructures are on the
horizon. My customers (I moved from academia / NJIT last year) are
asking for help in building their Web Object Architectures. It seems to
me there service gaps that need to be filled. My student Jessica,
planning a masters project, (I am still doing research with NJIT), has
also hit numerous dead ends identifying services managing objects on the
web.

Having true, "touchable" objects on the web is a worthy ambition. I
feel strongly that it is within the scope of the w3c to promote
standards in this area. J2EE and .NET have come together in the web
services arena, but there is still a void in standard object services on
the web which needs to be filled.

Object services should address:

* instantiation and naming
* locations, copy control, caching and mobility
* reference management and garbage collection
* metadata management
* access control
* object and object class versioning and update control
* introspection
* transaction control
* event (and fault) monitoring
* security
* licensing

URN services could be an umbrella for these services, but I have found
almost nothing on URN services. UDI and WSDL provide a good services
model, but only address web services, not web objects. They do provide
a domain where standard web object services might be defined.

CORBA represents a rich Object functionality set
which is thoughtfully designed and robust. Furthermore, CORBA
interfaces can readily be expressed in SOAP/UDDI/WSDL.
It is a source of IDL we can use as long as we are carefull not to repeat its mistakes.

If we were to add object services as HTTP-NG was considering at one time
in the HTTP layer we would be increasing web complexity. Instead adding
object services as standard Web Services accessible using XML/SOAP we
are not increasing the complexity of the web itself. Third, we can only
provide standards to allow Web Object environments to collaborate, we
are not forcing them actually utilize or obey the functionality in a
particular way. Each Object can control it's own management by the by
the Object services it employs, if any, and we would want the object
user to be able to employ local cooperating object management services
for arbitrary Web Objects as well. Integration of certain services, such
as access control, with the web server is highly desirable, but this not
difficult where enterprise services such as LDAP are already in use.
The use of CORBA as a model would be especially convenient for access to
CORBA based objects the web.

In addition to CORBA, we can borrow interfaces for relevant services
from J2EE (JNDI, JINI, JMX(http://jboss.org) etc.) expressed as
XML/SOAP, and perhaps a subset of the Common Warehouse Metamodel (CWM,
http://www.omg.org/technology/cwm/index.htm ) may be useful as well as
UDDI and WSDL applied to objects rather than services. For certain
services such as mobility we might borrow interfaces from leading
research such as [[MobileRMI]] etc. at
http://cui.unige.ch/~ecoopws/ws00/index.html

See http://Xanthus.net/WebServices (HTML) http://www.xanthus.net/WebServices/WebObjectArchitecture.ppt (Powerpoint)

Am I missing something? Are these issues addressed somewhere?

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