Microsoft has released an early version of Indigo, a new communications system intended to let Windows programs more easily connect to other software. Update: Videos showing Indigo.
Microsoft lifts curtain on Indigo
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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why do i get the impression i have already seen something like this?
longhorn 20**
unix 1970?
DCOP, D-BUS?
thjayo: Silly. Unix has no communications architecture model comparable to indigo.
The goal of Indigo is to simplify the process of building distributed applications, where software components communicate across a network using Web services protocols.
Who’s the target for this? How many desktop users need a network distributed applications? And how is this different from SOAP?
Indigo is the COM+ replacement.
http://www.bebits.com/app/962
Eugenia: you should ban the word: “innovation” from OSNews. It’s really boring..
Anyone deal with MUSCLE clients and servers? Available on many platforms….
More reasons for me not to upgrade to Longhorn…sigh…when will M$ stop putting crap few people are going to use…err does anyone know if Longhorn will just be based on the XP codebase and features piled on top of it or is it a from scratch project?
More reasons for me not to upgrade to Longhorn…sigh…when will M$ stop putting crap few people are going to use…err does anyone know if Longhorn will just be based on the XP codebase and features piled on top of it or is it a from scratch project?
Its a development tool man.
Thats like saying that you aren’t going to use an OS because a new C++ compiler is coming out for it.
Longhorn will be the NT kernel yes.
Who’s the target for this? How many desktop users need a network distributed applications? And how is this different from SOAP?
It uses SOAP for the transport.
Heres a great presentation about using the Indigo Framework to build Realtime Collaboration/Groupware type applications.
PPT: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/6/9/669C56E3-12AF-48C5-AB2…
HTML: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=CLI380.ppt&meta=
Sounds a bit like Rebol/Services. It will do a bit less but is going to be much, much simpler and faster to build services and network aware apps with, crossplatform:
http://www.rebol.net/devcon04/pres/rebser/
It’s quite ironic to see another thread above this one that goes:“inux now has become so technically powerful that it lays claim to a prestigious title–it runs more of the world’s top supercomputers than any other OS.”
I must admit there’s a lot of truth in it.What doesn’t embed Linux these days;PDA’s,super computers,servers,desktops,etc..
Indigo is so much more than COM+; from what I understand it will provide a unified programming model which basically wraps up MSMQ, COM+, Web Services, Remoting, Sockets, etc…pretty much anything and everything networking. All of this is still very much a PITA w/ .Net 1.x, as a developer who’s worked on many .Net distributed systems I am very much looking forward to Indigo.
As far as SOAP, that’s one of the wire protocols; of course you will be able to use TCP/IP as well (much faster), or you can roll your own and plug it in (similar to how remoting is done now, except even less painful).
Last thing (in response to desktop users); they won’t necessarily see the benefits on surface level, but this is a good thing, the complexities of distributed computing need to be hidden from them. Point being, any corporate IT dept (no matter what size) can immediately start building beneficial distributed apps using Indigo w/ a much less steep learning curve than all the distributed technologies I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
Agreed, plus the benefit of finally droping a lot of old Win32 baggage.
Call me one of the few but I’m actually interested in Longhorn and eagerly awaiting to see what it can offer.
I would have watched it, had they not forced people to register – interesting, when SUN do this, we have screaming, nashing of teeth and slashing of wrist, but when it is Microsoft, its all ok.
NEXTSTEP PDO and native DO had this back in the early 90s and it worked.
So what happened to it? Why isn’t it around now?
Ahh…developmental tools. Who cares about dev tools when the darn OS is still based on something so darn old. From what I see this is not going to make the OS any faster or perform with less resources, crash less, be secure, look better and compete with alternative OSes in any better way than XP already can. I could be wrong but I guess then I am going to shut up and wait and see when Longhorn comes out if it is any better than what we have right now.
besides being a Big-WRAPPER of old technology is there anything new ?
NEXTSTEP was bought by a company that makes computers, worked a bit on it and called it Rhapsody. It failed to get on the market and they worked on it a bit more and rebranded it again:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/
🙂
Well yes, of course I realize that…but does OSX have a comparable messaging API to Indigo? (not challenging, I’m just simply not familiar w/ OSX infrastructure/API’s). I do realize that Indigo isn’t “innovative” in that what it attempts to do for messaging isn’t revolutionary, but when you look at the disparate mechanisms in Win32/.Net, Indigo will indeed be revolutionary for windows programmers in simplifying the messaging API.
What’s wrong w/ wrappers? If it simplifies the API and makes development more productive, then yeah…I’d say there’s something “new” there. I swear to god, some people think that programming has to involve going around your elbow to get to your arse to get anything done.
One of the hardest programming tasks is building (effecient) distributed systems that utilize messaging/networking protocols, and Indigo will drastically simplify this by providing a transport layer/protocol/mechanism (meaning MSMQ||SOAP||TCP||etc) agnostic API which simply “gets the job done” in a more productive, effecient manner (from a development standpoint).
Almost correct.
Indigo is a replacement for the mess com+, dcom, webservices, remoting and entreprise services.
At the moment a developer needs to make a choice between different crappy technologies. With indigo there should be a single interface (which could very well prove to stillbe crappy)
“Core Foundation defines several opaque types that correspond to Mach ports, message ports, and BSD sockets. These objects allow your application to communicate between multiple threads, with other processes, and other computers over a network.”
From http://developer.apple.com/documentation/CoreFoundation/Conceptual/…
Apple provides far from the best documentation in the world for it, but theres a LOT on programming for these ports elsewhere on the web.
Ah, my mistake, I skipped over the Cocoa/Objective-C API:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/DistrObje…
This is probably more comparable.