Lead Program Manager, OLE/COM
Microsoft Corporation
(natbro@microsoft.com)
Chief Technical Officer
IONA Technologies
(aotoole@iona.com)
The W3C staff has been studying and tracking the area of
distributed objects and mobile code since the formation
of the Consortium. Recently, we have been asked once again to consider how
the Web technologies (in particular HTTP) and object-oriented distributed
systems can share technology. While we are not yet prepared to propose the
allocation of major resources to this area, our interest remains high. As
part of our own technical education, we feel it is important that the W3C
staff move from a general understanding of the field to a detailed knowledge
of the technical specifications for two of the important technologies:
Microsoft's DCOM and OMG's
CORBA.
Toward this end, we have asked an expert in each of these technologies to come to our MIT site and spend an evening and a full day doing a very detailed technical comparison. This will not be an overview, and it will not be about deployment, marketing, or intellectual property rights. It will be strictly about the technical details of the two systems and how they can be brought to bear on the issues facing the web.
Since we expect that many member companies are also interested in this information, we would like to invite appropriate employees of the member companies to join us in this symposium. W3C will provide a location (probably on the MIT campus) and a moderator whose job will be to be certain that the event remains concentrated on the technical comparison of the systems. Our plan is to run the symposium roughly as follows: