Re: Ada & .Net (Rotor)

["Juergen Pfeifer" <nospam@nospam.org>]

Well, lets look a bit at history: Windows became really successfull when
Visual Basic arrived and made the platform much more easier to program. That
led to new apps that made the platform more attractive for developers... To
improve reusability they then invented COM as a very successfull component
model. You get it...?!

Today the platform is the Internet. .NET is a component model for the
internet. The .NET remoting architecture - its base for distributed
computing - is quite open and there exist some implementation of the
remoting model, e.g. SOAP over HTTP or a .NET proprietaty binary protocol
over IP. Java is a programming language for the Internet, but .NET is much
more: it is a language agnostic component model for the Internet. The
virtual object system in the .NET VM is far more oriented to that goal then
the JVM which was designed from the beginning for toasters and coffee
machines.  The metadata model and the reflection mechanism is very complete
and - unlike the JVM - you can extend even the metadata model. That provides
a very interisting and elegant framework for modern concepts like
declarative programming or aspect oriented programming. Not to menntion that
such a framework is an excellent base for mostly automatic and transparent
serialization support etc.

You should not identify .NET with C#. .NET is really language agnostic and
the intermediate language (the "bytecode") is designed from the beginning to
support that (for example there is a concept of references in the machine
model which makes it very easy to have procedures with out params; try this
with JVM). Most of the power is really in the virtual execution engine, the
virtual object model and the class libraries.

If you have a basic understanding of the architecture and then use Visual
Studio.NET to write a .NET component that exposes it's interfaces via SOAP
just by declarative programming, or write an ASP.NET page with a compelling
user interface just the way you did before with VB on Windows - then you
start to understand that the intention is to copy the successfull Windows
<-> VB story in the Internet era: provide an iinternet standards based
platform and a component and programming model that makes it very easy to
write services and apps for the platform.

Juergen

"M�rio Amado Alves" <maa@liacc.up.pt> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:mailman.1018529522.8353.comp.lang.ada@ada.eu.org...
> <<
> Not all of those things are good for the end users and sometimes they
> have been rejected by the market. Maybe .NET fits into that category -
> it has yet to be seen. Maybe its a Solution in search of a Problem?
> >> (MCD)
>
> Definitely. Actually to me it is not even clear what .NET _is_. /* Maybe
> it's just me; however I undertand perfectly what Rotor--a thing "at the
> heart of .NET"--is. So I might be confused--but not worried ;-) */
>
> Cheers,
> --MAA
>