Adam totally nails it! Corba s*cked and so too does having to have write custom code to read from every database! And of course Adam backs up my contention that RSS (including Atom), XMPP and perhaps SIP (despite the B*llheads best efforts they didn't manage to scr*w up SIP 100%) are the only "standards" and protocols that matter. Well OK he doesn't mention XMPP and SIP :-) !

From Learning from THE WEB.:

QUOTE

RSS 2.0 has reached the tipping point where it is universally understood. Missing from RSS is the time-to-live (TTL) indicator necessary for caching, but as discussed, HTTP provides a coarse-grained model for this. In short, it may well be that a lot of useful information is going to flow over the Web as either RSS 2.0 or Atom (or both, depending on the type the requester asks for). It addresses many of the serious limitations or outages in XML today.

All of this has profound implications for databases. Today databases violate essentially every lesson we have learned from the Web.

1. Are simple relaxed text formats and protocols supported? No. We're still in the CORBA world. One still requires custom code to read a database. It is as though the browser required a driver to talk to each site (or at least type of site). It makes no sense in this day and age, and, as we have just seen, there is now a worthy candidate in Atom for a default protocol that every database should support, and in both Atom and RSS 2.0 for a wire format.

UNQUOTE

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