Possible uses of HTTP and objects

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As a transport for object-oriented remote procedure call.
As a transport for existing distributed OO systems (ILU)

An example of a mapping of a object-oriented remote procedure call on HTTP:

Remote Method invocation HTTP
receiver object URLs
method HTTP method (GET/PUT/POST/etc)
parameters request content
result(s) response content

Remote Method invocation	HTTP
receiver object	URLs
method	HTTP method (GET/PUT/POST/etc)
parameters	request content
result(s)	response content

Even easier: package the entire request (receiver object, method, parameters) as the request content. Use POST method, and URL is an engine to unpack the request, invoke the request, and send the result back as the response content. This has been modeled in Smalltalk using VisualAge public interfaces as an interface definition.

Patrick J. Mueller (pmuellr@acm.org)
OOPSLA '96 Workshop on "Toward the integration of WWW and Distributed Object Technology"