Web objects: towards a Web based model of distributed computing

Currently there is much hype surrounding Web services. Essentially Web services are a simple platform-neutral means for programs to communicate across the Internet. They promise to bring distributed computing to the Internet and to pick up where DCOM, RMI and CORBA technologies have failed. Web services can represent messaging or RPC style communication; however they are considerably more restricted than traditional communications technologies. This paper describes a model for Web services that incorporates object oriented features, including the encapsulation of state, object references, and object migration. In this way Web services achieve similar flexibility to distributed object technologies such as RMI and achieve other important goals such as simple deployment. All this is done without needing any new technologies such as languages or protocols, or needing to extend Web services.