How Infospheres differs from Java Beans, Active X, Netscape ONE.

I Find Karma (adam@cs.caltech.edu)
Fri, 23 Aug 96 00:51:59 PDT

In an earlier post to FoRK, I was wondering out lout how our research
in Infospheres (http://www.infospheres.caltech.edu/) differed
significantly from Java Beans, Active X, and Netscape ONE, if our
component object models were so similar. I think I understand our
differences to be in 2 areas:

1. DJINN - A djinn is a program structuring construct that serves as
an infosphere component, and our research involves creating techniques
for specifying, designing, implementing, reasoning about, and
discovering djinns.

2. SESSIONS and VIRTUAL ORGANIZATIONS - Collections of djinns can
come together in either connection-oriented or connectionless groups to
perform distributed tasks. Sessions and virtual organizations are two
structuring concepts that allow djinns to perform such distributed tasks.
Our research involves creating techniques for specifying, designing,
initiating, executing, termination, and reasoning about sessions and
virtual organizations.

Note that in our Infospheres research, we make use of object-oriented
and Web technologies wherever possible in the specification, design,
implementation, reasoning about, and discovery of djinns, sessions, and
virtual organizations. In this way, we complement current ongoing
efforts rather than compete with them. In some sense, then, we can
build these constructs using Java Beans, Active X, or Netscape ONE, or
even whatever else might be coming along, because their component object
models ARE so similar to ours.

:) Adam