While COM/ActiveX is available to some extent on Windows, Mac, and a very small subset of unixes (Solaris??), I think we need a better mechanism.
The biggest problem is that the whole web paradigm is such a poor way of navigating through information in the first place. Using a web browser is much like having to read a book by owning a whole copy of the book for each page; you read the first page in the first book, then set it down and pick up the next copy to read the second page, and so on. HTML was designed to provide static text; nothing more. Now, in search of new ways to separate people from their money, we have had an incredible number of kludges added to the browsers- activex, plugins, "Dynamic" html, xml, etc. yet we're still stuck with a basically inflexible and poorly laid out interface. Someone once described MS-DOS as CPM modified after hearing of rumors of Unix; the web browser interface is winfile.exe as modified from rumors of Smalltalk. Do we really want to cripple a distributed Squeak by tying it into the web paradigm? Or can we brainstorm something different?
Now, I don't have any suggestions; Closest I've come to a distributed app is client/server database work which is almost as bad as the web from the point of view of keeping individual images independent, yet able to work together. I don't know what it is, but there has got to be something better.
William
William Barnett-Lewis wlewis@mailbag.com
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org