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The Web. That vast, global network of computers delivering almost limitless amounts of information with unprecedented speed. All of it connected by millions of miles of copper, glass, electrons, and light. A miracle. Really.
Yet, for all that, this phenomenal, gargantuan Net just sits there passively. It isn't realizing its full potential.
All those pages, all that information -- and so little interaction between them. Suppose you're editing a Spanish-language document. As things are now, you'd better have a good grasp of spelling and syntax, or have a good Spanish spell-checker bookmarked. Wouldn't it be nice if your document and the spell-checker could find each other, without you getting involved?
That's the idea behind Web computing, a software architecture that enables information from widely disparate parts of the Web to speak to each other. And WebBroker is the first official attempt at standardizing Web computing.
Last month, the World Wide Web Consortium, the industry body that recommends open standards for the Web, formally recognized WebBroker.
"WebBroker is a mechanism that enables you to talk to objects over the Web," said Mike Dierken, senior software architect for DataChannel, the company that submitted WebBroker to the consortium. Web computing is one term DataChannel applies to the concept.
The components that technologies like WebBroker seek to connect are small binary programs that perform a specific task and can open themselves to other components and applications. Backers of Web computing believe that much of what is networked via the Web and intranets can be turned into usable components, if they already aren't.
When interacting via the Web, components offer some intriguing possibilities. One example is the aforementioned Spanish-language spell-checker. Encountering a document in Spanish, your word processor would automatically locate, install, and employ a remote Spanish spell-checking dictionary that it found on the Web.
"All you need to have is a way to look things up that identify what you want to get done," said Dierken.
Rather than just having a simple news page on the Web with links to related documents, the stories, graphics, and pictures could find complementary information that would update or enhance them. Sites, databases, and software applications could automatically integrate with other text, data, and multimedia components that might complement them.
WebBroker's standout feature, DataChannel said, is that its mechanism for connecting objects speaks "native Web," in the form of the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and the extensible markup language, or XML. Thus, anything set up on a Web server, accessible through the hypertext transfer protocol, can be accessed as a component.
The technology's Web-based design contrasts with the proprietary protocols of other object "models," which include (breathe here) Microsoft's Component Object Model (COM) and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). All which ties into the equally dense subject of middleware, the software that serves to provide a link between disparate applications.
The folks who envision a distributed, self-aware Web would like to see it go from just a static platform for retrieving files to a kind of live info-organism.
But WebBroker isn't reaching quite as high as that scenario might suggest. "We're solving a low-level technical issue," Dierken said. "We're addressing how you can get your code on the Web and make it distributed right away, without totally redesigning it."
Infospheres
But there is a project with somewhat loftier goals underway at the California Institute of Technology, called Infospheres.
"Our system is a distributed system where all the objects are active objects," said Joseph Kiniry, a Ph.D. graduate student who's a member of the Infospheres research team. He and others are interested in not just bringing objects to the Web, but making them as sophisticated as possible -- automatic, self-aware, and intelligent.
As Kiniry puts it, "we are object purists first and Web gurus second." The Infospheres active object, built using the Java programming language because of its small size and portability, can "look at itself," Kiniry said, and turn itself it into a threaded computer process, ready to act on itself and other objects.
Thus, project members see a future for the Web as a worldwide pool of objects interacting with one another. Everyone with a computer using the Web keeps dozens of objects, each with individual functions suited to that computer and that person or organization.
Infospheres' ambitious vision is one reason the project emphasizes a system that can accommodate a massive size, i.e. scalability.
A handful of companies are already expressing interest, Kiniry said. Norfolk Southern, an East Coast railroad company, is interested in using Infospheres in crisis management over its internal network. When a problem occurs on the tracks, a train engineer could alert a system whose interacting, intelligent objects would kick into gear, supplying people and computers with information necessary to handle the crisis.
Network vendor Novell is interested in Infospheres for creating a more automatic operating system, Kiniry said.
To these ends, the Infospheres groups work on ways for objects to find each other, reconfigure themselves, and adapt to changes. Among the software building blocks are the software technologies of XML, Java, CORBA, and COM. The project receives government funding from theNational Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, as well as corporate funding from Novell and Parasoft Corporation.
The first implementation of the Infospheres architecture was released earlier this year and the team is now at work on version 2.0.
A super-fluid Web future?
Ultimately, Web computing is a new application for the youthful medium that, like browsing, uses the Web as its platform. But unlike browsing's HTML, it's an application without a ubiquitous infrastructure. That infrastructure is just what protocols like WebBroker and Infospheres are trying to provide.
Many obstacles remain. Developers will have to resolve bandwidth limitations, older, object-resistant software, and sheer complexity of Web computing when compared to Web publishing.
Kiniry expects Web computing's success to take hold when a company the size of a Sprint or MCI sees the cost and efficiency benefits, and adopts it.
But if and when that day comes, DataChannel's Dierken notes that the implications and effects of a Web that becomes a kind of giant computer are difficult to fully grasp. If every piece of information becomes dynamic, the Web could become too fluid, too changing. Any sense of permanency might become all too rare when documents, systems, and other "objects" constantly update themselves.
"On the one hand, you could have complete chaos," he said. "On the other hand, you could have complete nirvana."
Nonetheless, Kiniry said he, for one, is eager. "We know that this is eventually going to happen. It might be 10 years down the line, but it will happen."
