The Universal Concept

Meeting the universal requirement is a somewhat daunting task, especially when the applications we want to connect run on different hardware, different operating systems, and different platforms. After all, each hardware type, operating system, and platform can have its own type system, memory management scheme, transports, and protocols. When viewed in the light of the accidental architecture of most organizations, we need a way to connect applications in a vendor-neutral manner. Over time, the industry has attempted several times to standardize type systems, memory management schemes, transports, and protocols across hardware, operating system, and platform boundaries. These include CORBA, DCE / RPC, RMI, COM+ and DCOM. For the most part, each of these efforts has failed to gain industry-wide acceptance in the long-term..

However, the industry has universally embraced the Internet and its accompanying standards. Without exception, modern hardware, operating systems, and platforms are able to communicate over the Internet. The acceptance of Internet standards results from the universal nature of HTTP, HTML, and XML. In essence, communicating over the Internet requires the ability to send or receive data that adheres to these standards and does not require a proprietary type system, memory management scheme, or internal protocols. To put it simply, Internet communication focuses on the data that is transmitted rather than focusing on a particular type system, operating system, or platform.