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STRATEGIC DEVELOPER: JON UDELL http://www.infoworld.com
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Thursday, December 23, 2004
MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTS
By Jon Udell
Posted December 17, 2004 3:00 PM Pacific Time
Last month I wrote about MSH ("monad"), Microsoft's new command shell,
and demonstrated the software on my blog. The column-plus-demo drew
favorable reactions not only from the Windows crowd, but also from
Unix/Linux folk who saw the MSH object pipeline as a genuine innovation.
They're right.
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Although MSH retains the venerable Unix pipeline, which is an
indisputably excellent framework for integration, it abolishes what
Monad architect Jeffrey Snover has called "faith-based parsing." Those
who have worshipped in that church for decades know just what he means.
In Unix shells we must simply believe that programs will output the data
structures we expect. There's no way to interrogate those outputs,
verify or falsify our beliefs, and adapt intelligently to change.
The value of a pipeline based on self-describing objects is immediately
obvious. The source of those magical objects, however, has not been so
widely appreciated. MSH relies on, and will also help to accelerate, the
wrapping of Windows system services in .Net Framework classes. A couple
of years ago, at a briefing on the then-named .Net Server, Microsoft
hinted that large swaths of its server suite were being rewritten in
managed code. Of course that wasn't practical then, isn't practical now,
and may not be so for years to come. But managed-code interfaces wrapped
around the existing systems are feasible and really useful. That message
wasn't powerful enough to stop the rebranding of .Net Server as Windows
Server 2003, but it's a big deal nonetheless.
As Windows steadily evolves into a family of products that integrates by
means of managed objects, all sorts of benefits accrue. Interfaces are
easier to discover. Composite applications come together more quickly
and, thanks to modern exception handling, behave more reliably. The
chasm that separates command-line oriented applications from graphical
applications becomes easier to cross.
All this adds up to an imminent challenge to Unix/Linux. In that
ecosystem, Java is the logical counterpart to .Net in the Windows world.
Despite its huge head start, though, Java has done surprisingly little
to rationalize basic system management and integration in the Unix/Linux
realm. It's understandable, if regrettable, that Linux and Java have
never intertwined as intimately as they might have done. For all its
potential value, the union would have had to overcome deep divisions. On
the technical front, Java's object-oriented purity can seem to float
above the gritty realities of the C and C++ trenches. And on the
cultural front, Sun's ownership of Java conflicts with Linux's open
source purity.
Why, though, hasn't Sun done more to bring these worlds together? With
its strategic stake in Java on the one hand and both Solaris and Linux
on the other, you'd think it would make sense to combine these
technologies in more than just a rhetorical way.
The wild card here, by the way, is Novell. With Suse and Ximian under
one roof, it's at least conceivable that Microsoft's Windows strategy
could play out on Linux in terms of Mono, the open source implementation
of .Net. That's an incredible long shot, of course, but the synergies
are worth pondering.
Jon Udell is lead analyst at the InfoWorld Test Center.
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