[cap-talk] Scope/span of capability systems

[Ben Kloosterman]

>Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > In a world where we can't even agree on compatible
> > data formats, I see little chance to agree on
> > compatible capability interfaces, which have
> > potentially a much higher degree of complexity.
>
>The low level standards were agreed back in the early
>days of the internet, where all the key engineers could,
>and regularly did, meet around a coffee table.
>Committees and consensus do not scale.  The bigger they
>are, the worse they perform.  As the internet has grown
>larger, committees have become ever more bureaucratic,
>rigid, stupid, incompetent, and slower.  Even though
>many of the individuals in a large committee may be very
>smart, the committee as a whole is apt to be moronic.
>
>Even if you have centralized authority, as at Microsoft,
>as the number and complexity of interfaces multiplies,
>chaos and disaster is apt to ensue, leading to the
>problem of DLL Hell.

The main issue for DLL was developers NOT following specifications. Eg I
remember one case I dealt with where 2 developers both modified a Borland C
system lib.
This is similar to css and html standard where I think the term css hell is
very appropriate.  It is very hard for committees to enforce standards. 


<snip> 
>
>
>What we need is something like MIDL, but defining
>messages, rather than function interfaces, and which,
>like MIDL, generates code that guarantees that if a
>connection is made, both sides are compiled the same
>interface definition, without the existence of new
>definitions crippling the behavior of old definitions
>in mixed environments.

Isn't that exactly what the  SOA ( Axis and WCF) stacks do using wsdl? And
they also "guide" the developer into not forgetting latency based issues
which caused all the disasters in Distributed Object systems.  Can a
capability system handle an SOA stack and can we modify SOA for secure
capabilities ? If you can tie into SOA other systems can work with the Cap
OS solving a major hurdle. A new protocol will never fly. 

This is one of the main things I will be looking at with my OS later ( eg 18
months away as I can run MS WCF lib) .

Regards, 

Ben