Ray has sold his soul to Microsoft - but still has some interesting things to say.
Fiddling around with MAPI and the Lotus Notes api I would agree. Proprietary, poorly documented interfaces suck. COM, UNO, etc are much nicer. But still not as easy to use as unix pipes.
In a way if you think about it Web services is much like taking the principles that unix has followed all along - transparency, text if possible... etc. and making them standard on other platforms and with proprietary software. Web services are simply the next step in the way Unix (and therefore linux) have slowly changed software - SMTP/POP/NNTP etc are all web services that connect over sockets. We have been doing web services for over 15 years!
Ozzie describes WinFS as sort of a Andrew File System(AFS) meets Kazaa. Intermezzo is the file system I would love to try out if I had some time - sounds impressive. WinFS sounds like ID3 tags (xml descriptors), plus automated unix mounts and the grep command for joe user. In AFS, CODA etc you don't really know where the file resides when you open it. The file system sends a request to search for it (from another file system or tape backup system). So in effect you are requesting a pointer to a file which can reside anywhere.
a nice take on bits on the wire / text on the wire
Posted by Anthony at November 20, 2003 11:31 AM | TrackBack