Re: [DotGNU]Webservice Goals

[Peter Minten]

James Michael DuPont wrote:
> 
> What follows is a summary of my current ideas to this
> important topic that you brought up Peter.
> 
> My motto however is build interfaces and not write
> duplicate code. We have man centuries of source code
> available under the GPL license.
> Let us build web services that respect them, interface
> with exisiting code.
> Let us build data gatways for providing secure and
> reposable threadsafe interfaces to older code.
> These web services would also be secure for usage by
> authenticate clients. That will allow for the creation
> of a secure and powerful set of tools.

If this can be done that would be (obviously) a Good Thing :-).
 
> By standardizing, automating and documenting that code
> we can implement safe and standardized web and IL code
> and data gateway interface to GPLed code.  This IL
> interface will allow a two-way gateway between GCC
> compiled code and cscc compiled code, with
> typemapping, including a thread safe function
> invocation system. Security features will allow for
> exposing of interfaces that normally would not be
> exposed and the authentication of the function calls.
> 
> The type of linkage security of the kernel can provide
> that type of safty, also inside a static lib, but the
> IL interface will have to verify each method invoked
> from outside for the validity of the function call.

Any volunteers to tackle this? :-)

> The GNU community project has put man years into a
> gpled office tools, we should reuse them via IL
> interfaces and well planned APIs. Staroffice publishes
> thier iterface in a high level IDL. C# is also fine
> for an IDL language as far as I can tell.

Good idea (though I prefer OpenOffice over StarOffice (AFAIK OpenOffice
is open source, StarOffice isn't)).
 
> I agree with you in spirit, and propose to please
> allow me to write modules in perl as well. By locking
> us into a programming language and not into a IL
> linkage and providing IL bindings for at least perl
> you will be loosing access to the CPAN modules and a
> HUGE knowledge and experience base.

Of course Perl can be used as scripting language, any language that can
be used with IL can be used as a scripting language for that matter.

Steering Comittee: can we make it a DotGNU recommendation to provide an
IL interface for extensibility. So to say: 'programs should be
extensible using scripting languages that can connect to IL bindings'?

> > - DotGNU Designer
> >
> > * Create visual software design schemes
> What about reusing bits of DIA by providing a C#
> language interface and publishing that to the Ruby via
> a DOTGNU scripting languge data gateway?
>
> What about including the VCG tool for automated layout
> of graphs? The ability to output to PNG and have hrefs
> for nodes, and a clickable href interface.
> 
> The ability to graph out exisiting software by
> providing an UML data extractor for C# and IL
> intrfaces. Generation of code from the internal data
> repository.
>
> > - DotGNU Developer
> >
> > An IDE would be nice. DotGNU Developer could be an
> > IDE with the ability
> > to visually design interfaces and the stuff you
> > would expect in the
> > fancy commercial IDE's. Developer would also use
> > Ruby as extension
> > language and would of course be highly customizable.
> The abilitiy to extract needed meta data from source
> code to enhance the editor. Intergration of the emacs
> via the DOTGNU scripting language gateway.
> Inclusion of full code completion via embedding the
> csccc and gcc compilers for providing parse trees via
> the DOTGNU compiler metadata gateway.

All these idea's are fine by me.

In my opinion this is the future of DotGNU.

To put this in a speech:

"We will not make old software obsolete like Microsoft is bound to do,
instead we lift it up into the future of the web. We will not strive to
have one language for development, but instead we welcome all languages
into our mids. We will be secure even the code we build on isn't."

Of course speeches aren't complete without a motivating element :-),
here is the motivation part:

"These goals can be accomplished, and they can be accomplished sooner
than the industry expects of us, all it takes is cooperation,
perseverance and thinking. These goals may be very hard to reach, but if
we succeed we will have the killer apps that can defeat the forces of
propietary software on the new battle ground of the webservices net."

The only thing needed to get this operation started is the green light
of the DotGNU community. The sooner these plans get accepted by DotGNU,
the sooner we will have those neat killer apps ready.

Greetings, 

Peter