DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING AND THE FLAT WORLD OF XML

I think there is a connection between these two topics. Let me explain what I mean.

XML is becoming the dominant messaging body for wired and wireless communications. We are going down to the flat world of XML from the hills of rich object structures.

The need for object brokers, serialization mechanisms, and intermediate translators between communication parties is decreasing more and more. Does that mean we have been getting rid of objects all along? Impossible! We still need formatted data. So, how would we send and understand unknown structured objects?

We probably shouldn't. We shouldn't send MS Excel or PDF files from a sender to a recipient. We shouldn't send service objects either. We might not need to continue collecting document handlers and service utilities at our machines. We might not need to increase the size of a hard drive ten times every two years.

What can we do instead? Here, distribution processing comes into play. Today, we live in a disconnected world where most of your computing happens on your computer. If a collection of software products on your PC does not include, for example, Adobe Acrobat Reader the system will complain that it has no program to open this file.

In the connected world, things will be different. Your machine will always be on the Internet, with millions of specialized services that are ready to help you.