[cap-talk] Scope/span of capability systems

[James A. Donald]

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

James A. Donald:
 > > 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.

Ben Kloosterman wrote:
 > The main issue for DLL was developers NOT following specifications.

That specifications have a single meaning, that they are sane and 
usable, that they are sufficiently up to date to have some faint 
connection to reality, and so on and so forth, becomes less and likely 
as the tasks to be done and the number of people involved become larger 
and larger.

 >> What we need is something like MIDL, but defining
 >> messages,

 > Isn't that exactly what the  SOA ( Axis and WCF) stacks
 > do using wsdl?

In theory, except that one WCF implementation fails to work with another 
and one SOA implementation fails to work with another - even though WCF 
is whatever Microsoft decides that it is, it seems that Microsoft 
suffers from schizophrenia.  Any solution that is based on "Let everyone 
be compatible by doing things the same way" tends to wind up like that.

Also SOA and WCF is built on top of http, and has large overheads, while 
MIDL is high efficiency in the case of a single threaded process (though 
the various hacks designed to extend MIDL to multiprocessing are apt to 
produce intolerable inefficiencies.)  One could not use WS-* for the 
capabilities one wants to manage access by programs to a file system.