The Benefit of Monikers to End Users
I always thought COM (and CORBA) monikers had huge potential for end-users. I don’t believe modern middleware schemes have the equivelent of COM monikers.
Currently, if you would like to import some data from one program to another (i.e. your spreadsheet and some source of realtime information designed to expose data), it can be quite a challenge to end-users, unless the provider and consumer have used the DDE interface or in Windows the RTD interface (which is very limited, but probably good enough for most apps).
I think a better and quite promising approach for end-users would have a few standard interfaces for things users need to typically do: retrieve data periodically, retrieve data once. If users could just enter the moniker syntax to find the object (i.e. in a cell in their spreadsheet), much like a DDE syntax which most users can handle, and have their data updates arrive nicely, they would be set. A moniker solution would further allow users to have a way to locate objects in ways the provider of the data source might never have thought of.
Some possible use cases, where a user might want to bring some realtime data into a spreadsheet, SCADA package, stock quotes, factory throughput, etc. All the stuff we still gimble together with DDE.
For example to extract a source of information from the internet,
you could do something like “url:http://www.underdoug.ca:xpath://realtime/@temperature[1]” to return the first temperature reading on the web page www.underdoug.ca. This is cool because it shows the composition of two monikers by the user without writing any code: one to retrieve a web page, and the other to extract a number from an html file with an xpath expression.
All this would take is a moniker system similar to that of DCOM and a simple convention of how to update values (i.e. a standard programmatic interface that is similar to the Smalltalk Model-View-Controller paradigm). It could all be built on SOAP or AJAX or REST or XML or whatever. The key is to make it dead simple to bring a value into user applications without programming, from a variety to data sources, without the user application having to be concerned with how the provider of information provides it - the steps to find the inforformation and retrieve it are handled by the moniker rather than the user application.
Technorati Tags: middleware, CORBA, DCOM, DotNet, JavaBeans