Greg Papadopoulos: Death of Wire Protocols
May 24, 1999
Greg Papadopoulos
is Chief Technology Officer of Sun Microsystems.
Greg said that there is more and more emphasis on the networking of consumer products.
The shift is from software and services to consumers; the way we deliver software and services
is different for consumer products.
"Networking is more than supplying connectivity; it's about providing services."
He sees four layers: content, services, connectivity, and devices, the middle two getting the
most emphasis soon. Someday the word webtone will be as common as dialtone,
as the Web becomes truly ubiquitous and quality-focused.
Greg stated the characteristics of Network Services:
- they are named
- they are accessed by interfaces
- they may publish and/or subscribe to other network services
- they are aware of service consumers
The current TCP/IP network service with named endpoints and client/server model is not good enough.
We now need service protocols -- APIs at the service level,
application provider to network service layer to device.
In classic protocols, datagrams are sent between heterogeneous computers.
This is being replaced by dynamic protocols that rely on distributed objects:
- computers appear to be homogenous via Java Virtual Machine (JVM)
- send around code
- common understanding of objects
- remote objects talk to each other
- remote methods for distributed applications.
Consider a printer that sends objects to a phone telling the device how to invoke its print
methods. This is the
Jini model --
viewing the printer as a service that must be announced
via a discovery process, the Jini lookup service.
The key concept according to Papadopoulos is that
"executable objects can be dynamically (and safely)
communicated among machines." Proxies are viewed as an application tier;
they are cheap, time-shared, and scalable resources.
The computing model has changed:
- 50's to 70's: disk centric computing, DBMS, applications, devices
- 80's and 90's: net centric computing, telnet, FTP, HTTP, SMTP, network devices
- now: object centric computing, business logic, object plus agents, services; basic services as objects
Sun's Chief Technology Officer offered these predictions:
- Home = office = consumer; consumer will drive the industry; Microsoft already handled home + office.
Corollary: network computer = webphone
- Voice network = data network (dialtone = webtone)
- Intranet = extranet = internet; firewalls will disappear because security will be integrated into devices
- A few big service providers will prevail; cycles consumed as a commodity
- Software as a product replaced by application providers; application provider will sell to service providers
- Meta service provider will intermediate interactions; e-commerce cooperatives
- The net goes fractal; action will be in the "little services"
- We'll discover we built the wrong network
- Most communication will be computers talking via objects; devices won't know what they are saying
- It will all actually work!
[A transcript of this talk is not yet
available online. We will provide a link as soon as one is available.]
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