Shibboleth Developers

[Derek Atkins <>]

Scott Cantor 
<>
 writes:

> You'd get the argument from those folks that the reason for CORBA is
> that RPC isn't object-oriented. They would be resistant to a
> characterization that they tried to reproduce RPC. Note that I'm not
> disagreeing with you, just pointing out why RPC is unpopular with some
> of those folks.

My personal opinion is that CORBA is RPC on sterroids.  I've looked at
CORBA, and honestly, IMHO, that's what it is.  It does give you an
object-based model, but the IDL is almost exactly like what you'd feed
to rpcgen, except it has a few additional constructs that don't exist
in ONC-RPC.

I honestly don't know why people dislike RPC so much..  Probably
because of how limited it is.  But if you only need simple stuff, the
limitation implies less code, less complexity, and less stuff to "go
wrong". :)

> question can be asked of ONC. In this context, it's a good fit because
> it's a local abstraction.

Definitely.. I would not have suggested RPC if the plan were not a
colocation of the SHAR.

> > Yes, I mean scheme literally.  Yes, as in the LISP-like 
> > language.  I envision something like this (for a simplistic example):
> > 
> '((http://www.mydomain.edu/my/application/ (member:mit-staff
> member:cmu-staff))
>   (http://www.mydomain.edu/your/app/ (member:mit-student
> member:cmu-student))
>   (http://www.mydomain.edu/ (any)))
> 
> My only comment here would be that we have been looking at XACML as a
> potential policy language. You might want to peruse that spec and see
> how it might be expressible within your model.

URL?  I'll go look at it.  This part is easily the least concrete
of my whole proposal.  The only reason I'm suggesting scheme is that:

 1) scheme interpretters are small and easily embedded (libguile.so is
    560KB on my Linux box)

 2) with good "policy abstractions" you can make the end-user
    configuration arbitrarily easy and simple (as show above)

 3) I think an arbitraily complex XML file will be more challenging
    for a user to configure by hand than an arbitrarily complex Scheme
    file.  Then again I come from MIT so I may be mistaken, but I
    can't envision any XML file ever being as simple as the example
    above.

 4) you get a turning-complete configuration system, which is always a
    good thing :)

> -- Scott

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       

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