[RDF] Little bits of thinkering...

[Stefan Andersson]

> > The language is pitched as a 'Java killer', aiming for most of the nifty
> > features that made Java cool.
> 
> Larry Wall made a reference to a interview with the C# head architect on
> Oreilly:
>         http://windows.oreilly.com/news/hejlsberg_0800.html

Quite an interesting article. But something about this whole C#-thing
gives me the creeps.
What the heck, maybe I'm going geek. :-D

(I actually spent about an hour formulating a somewhat 'sharp' response
to the msdn-article - and just as I was about to press 'submit' my
Netscape crashed. Spooky...)

> He said:
>         Here's another article that talks about a lot of the things we
>         *should* be thinking.  In fact, it's possible this article should
>         be required reading for anyone who aspires to be a Perl designer.

Hmmm. I'm not really sure I understand what he means. Maybe he was
refferring to the component architecture thing, maybe he was refferring
to MS surveying its developer community. Maybe he was just trying piss
some purists off...

> I'm as entusiastic as ever over the work with Perl 6 that is going
> on.  Everything is going to get better, faster, smaller, easier, more
> intuitive, powerful and with loads of new cool fetaures. ;-)

I'd say that some sort of object persistense and the ability of
seamlessly invoke, serialize and transfer objects - properties and
methods - would be right up there in the top 5. But I'm no Perl guy.

> And its inspiering to read the language design discussions.  This stage of
> the Wraf development is rather low level. We are designing a
> meta-language.

Umm. I thought we were developing APIs and schemas? ?-|
 
> > #4: Did I tell you about the 'parallell failure channel' I thought of
> > some years ago? 
> How would this differ from a normal traceback availible by the perl Carp
> functions?

* It would (in my fantasies, that is) be an integrated result handling
solution, not just a diagnostic tool.
* It would separate the information flow into manageable, semantic,
parts
* It would be a required part of all components. I don't know if all
Perl functions and modules are croaking, carping and confessing, but I
don't think so?
 
> Maby you could give a more detaild example.

Well - If you'd get something like this back from a WORF:

<Description about="http://uxn.nu/helloworld#main"> <!-- The function
invokation -->
  <result rdf:type="http://uxn.nu/results#Failed" />
  <result rdf:type="http://uxn.nu/errors#functionCallFailed" />

  <value>Sorry!</value> <!-- the #main outputted an apology... -->

  <history>
    <Description
about="http://uxn.nu/helloworld#printText?text=Hello%20World">
      <result rdf:type="http://uxn.nu/results#Failed" />
      <result rdf:type="http://uxn.nu/errors#functionCallFailed" />

      <history>
        <Description about="http://uxn.nu/output?text=Hello%20World">
        <result rdf:type="http://uxn.nu/results#Failed" />
        <result rdf:type="http://uxn.nu/errors#noOutputAvailable" />
        </Description>
       </history> 
    </Description>
  </history>
</Description>

Wouldn't that make you feel you could do all sorts of nifty automatic
things with that output? Maybe even in some cases automatically deduce
the source of the error and re-submit a corrected function invocation?
:-D

(I must add that this is off the top of my head)

> Or explain how this could aply
> to Wraf.

:-D

>  A general problem is that the error doesnt originate in the
> current branch of the call tree, but from another branch there a shared
> data structure was modified with bad data.

Yes. That is a problem. But that's not really what I was adressing.
 
> > (The parallell failure channel really should be a feature of the
> > semi-SOAP I'm more and more interested in developing! We really should
> > call it WORF, for Web Object Remote Functions! (Or WRAF Object Remote
> > Functinality...))
> 
> Thats what the services do. It should be easy to just ad more services on
> diffrent machines, or use any service on the web. And it should be able to
> handle more trafic and more data by this distribution. The data
> replication should be transparent as an effect of the normal cache
> functions.

Yep. function equals data equals presentation. All the web servers in
the world are just component repositories, waiting for somebody to
invocate their member functions... ye-haa!
(As soon as I get this damn paper of mine written, I'll sit myself down
and write a prototype WORF application. Just to see it work.)

> But this is not my first intended use of Wraf...

Naah, it's just one more of those 'wouldn't it be cool if...')

> > Damn! This is getting dangerously close to what I saw in that vision
> > back in '97. Thank God MS obviously haven't seen the data ==
> > presentation == logic thing yet, and thought about combining it with
> > recursive self-reference.
> 
> Hush! You are on a open source mailing list. Sombody could actualy read
> this!!

Naah once more. We're just a bunch of spaced-out dreamers, right?

> Maby we shold put a GPL copyright on every message? ;)

Won't you make the 'mailman' do that? ;-D

> Anyway... Two more days to go.

Yup. See you monday.

/Stefan