Distributed-object computing
across a World Wide Web

Wm. Paul Rogers
Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

Friday, January 30, 1998
12:00 noon—MBARI Pacific Forum

The explosive growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) has given rise to the single largest client/server system ever imagined. Having been built around the stateless HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the Web is primarily a static, document-centric system. To create a fundamental change in computing, the Web must provide some means of dynamic behavior. The initial solution, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), is a slow, cumbersome mechanism and, at best, a short-term hack for extending client-side behavior via server-side functionality.

Among the more promising replacements to CGI is a growing base of object-oriented technologies ripe for utilization in next-generation web functionality. The Video Information Management System (VIMS) at MBARI is using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and the object-oriented language, Java, to extend beyond static models such as the WWW. These two technologies provide superbly complementary services on which to build distributed-object systems. This talk will review these and other relevant object-oriented topics in an overview of how these technologies are or can be used at MBARI, as well as their impact on the future direction of distributed object- and component-based computing.

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