day 86

digital darwinism 8: digital darwin

Eye Candy #5: The effects of evolution on humans is as unpredictable as a David Letterman joke. Is the evolution of the computer industry any more predictable? As I was saying, Microsoft's halting steps toward ActiveX is a good example of digital Darwinism. ActiveX is the current incarnation of Microsoft's proprietary middleware "glue" which has recently been aimed at Java. ActiveX is too proprietary to beat out Java (just as Money was no match for Quicken), but the next 3 years will be colorful as Microsoft and the Java Beast turn their machine guns on each other. But then, this conflagration is another story. ActiveX has its roots in the late 1980s with the idea (gleaned from Apple Computer's publish-and-subscribe) of "hot-linking" applications through a technology blandly called DLE (Dynamic Linking and Embedding). A hot link is a pipe for connecting two desktop applications such as WORD and EXCEL so that data can effortlessly flow between the two. A user need not worry about conversions or formats. Simply linking a graph in EXCEL to a picture in WORD accomplished the goal of interoperability. A change in an EXCEL graph is automatically propagated to all documents that reference the graph. DLE evolved into OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) which evolved into ActiveX (distributed OLE). The word "evolved" is appropriate. There was apparently no plan. Rather, there were mutants. There was no architecture. Rather, there were remodeling jobs piled on top of remodeling jobs. In fact, the design and implementation of OLE was so chaotic that version 1.0 had little relationship to version 2.0. OLE 2.0 was essentially a different product. ActiveX follows the same form - it has only some resemblance to 2.0. Here is an anonymous testimonial to the roughness of OLE: "In the beginning there was OLE 1.0 which was intended to deal with the creation and management of compound documents. True to Microsoft form, release 1 of this technology was found to be very rudimentary and did not prove popular with programmers. In May 1993 the first OLE 2.0 toolkit shipped and... it bore little resemblance in the API department to version 1, [but] it was generally found to be a much more robust offering. Now OLE 2.0 has evolved into a rather confusing beast. Its ancestry lies with the ability to link independent applications, exchange data between them and enable them to invoke functions on one another, all on one machine. However, while this is what it offers today, OLE 2.0 is more frequently referred to by Microsoft as 'the first step towards making Windows an object-oriented operating system.'" OLE works through binary DLLs rather than source-language bindings. This is one major difference between ActiveX and OpenDoc, for instance. A binary interface allows disparate developers to create and sell their components without exposing their source code. It also permits objects to be sewn together at runtime rather than statically bound at compile time. This flexibility alone was responsible for OLE's fast start in the component world. But the binary approach resulted in unwieldy designs that make it difficult for developers to build applications with the interoperability and portability of Java, for example. More importantly, ActiveX is a hacker's dream, not a basis for architectural masterpieces.

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