(2004-04-15) Vogels Web Services Not Distributed Objects

Werner Vogels [says](http://weblogs.cs.cornell.edu/All Things Distributed/archives/000120.html) that Web Services are not DistributedObjects. Web services have none of the characteristics of distributed object systems. There is no notion of an object, object reference, factories or life cycle. There is no notion of an interface with methods, data structure serialization or reference garbage collection. The only technology web services have is XML documents and document encapsulation... Distributed object technology is very mature and robust, especially if you restrict its usage to those environments which it has been designed for: the corporate intranet with often homogenous platforms and predictable latencies. The strength of web services is in the internet-style Distributed Computing, where interoperability and support for heterogeneity in terms of platforms and networks are essential... Internet-wide RPC has failed to succeed in the past, and web services are not going to be of much help in solving the issues surrounding wide-area RPC. There is no magic in the web services infrastructure that can suddenly overcome what excellent protocol architects were not able to achieve with DCE/RPC or GIOP. (Scalability)