![[ANSA]](../ANSA.gif)
![[ISF]](ISF.gif)
The ANSA Information Services Framework group is working on interoperability between the World Wide Web and Distributed Object systems based on CORBA. The primary objective of this work is to bring the added benefits of distributed object technology to the Web, without losing any of the features of the Web that have made it so successful.
ANSA is building a set of tools to integrate a distributed object model into WWW. The objective is to provide a CORBA based environment from which the web appears to consist of a world of distributed CORBA objects.
A paper describing this work, entitled "A Web of Distributed Objects" was presented at the Fourth International World Wide Web Conference on Tuesday the 12th of December, 1995, by Owen Rees; part of the presentation was given using the gateway software, with one component (I2H) running at APM in Cambridge, UK, and the others (H2I and Locator) running on the workstation at the conference in Boston - the transatlantic connection was running the IIOP protocol. The gateway software is now available as a source-code distribution.
At the WWW4 Conference in Boston, December 1995, there was also a panel discussion on "The Future of Object Technology in the WWW". This panel was chaired by Mark Madsen.
The WWW5 Conference in Paris in May 1996 will have two panel sessions on ISF specialities, both chaired by Mark Madsen.
Mark Madsen has also been asked to present the work of the ANSA ISF group at the Developers Day Session on Distributed Objects at WWW5.
Toby Speight has submitted a position paper entitled Building a Web from Distributed Objects to the Joint W3C/OMG Workshop on Distributed Objects and Mobile Code to be held in June 1996.
One of the interesting issues that arises in rebuilding the WWW with distributed objects is that of decoupling the URL scheme from the transport protocol.
Stub compiler technology, generating components for CGI programs and matching HTML forms, has been used to provide Object wrapping for WWW and the prototype code is available. This has been used to conduct some performance tests on HTTP and CGI.
The prototypes use IIOP, the W3C Reference Library, and other freely available software.
We also have some tools that we use to maintain (dead hyperlink - http://www.ansa.co.uk/index.html) our Web server.
Owen Rees was a panelist on the "Security on the Web" panel at the Third International World Wide Web Conference in Darmstadt 1995. The slides used to describe the ANSA view of distributed system security principles are here.
Members of the ANSA ISF Group have been active on the IETF Working Groups and mailing lists for discussion of Uniform Resource Identifiers. Mark Madsen has written an Internet-Draft, of which a version is available as HTML here, evaluating proposed standards for assignation and resolution of URNs (Uniform Resource Names). Note that this material has become out of date, with most of the proposed schemes decaying and no working group currently active in this area. It is hoped this situation will change.
The group is also involved in the effort to charter a new IETF WG on URCs (Uniform Resource Characteristics), which are the objects that encode metadata about the other resources and objects in the WWW. The draft of this charter is available under the URC pages (dead hyperlink - http://www.acl.lanl.gov/URC/) at Los Alamos National Labs.
Converted from text 8 May 1996 by <tms@ansa.co.uk>