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You’ve actually made my point, to get the most interoperability you need the most complex code. Assembly or TCP/IP are very good examples. They are both VERY portable technologies but very few people actually interact with it directly, they use less interoperable interface which offers defined interfaces to the abstract interface offered by the level below it. For tcp/ip it would be the OS sockets layer, for assembly it would be C or C and then PHP as in the case with interpreted languages.

You can try to define the ultimate interface, and unless absolutely everyone else jumps on your band-wagon, you’ll be writing code which is just as uninteroperable as the next guy.

In my humble opinion, the best is to stick with web standards and follow the steps outlined above to create a kickass application which is usuable, fast and reasonably extendable.

wanna go back to the hell the lock down of being stuck in cobol on their main frames caused about all major companies ?.

If you dont abstract information availability from platform and language dependencies you have to pay for it 10 times over later on.

problem is people think in their little box, not expecting their project to ever need to be integrated with other stuff in the future, esp if the orig coders are not around anymore and the technologies are old and the competence to use them is no where to find.

or lets move back to binary protols over TCP where you must take care of platform byte ordering etc ?.

For example, we’ve all had it beaten into us to write Java so that any database calls are platform neutral. We do it by either containing away JDBC code into its own little corner, putting SQL in property files, or by using ORM tools like Hibernate or iBatis.

The rationale is that you should be able to change database implementations with little pain. Sounds good, right? But when was the last time you changed DB implementations? ever?

What is the indirect result? We get better code quality. Our software has better structure and maintainability.
We see the same result when designing code to be interoperable. Even if no one tries to use it, the quality can be improved by the intent.
This is an area where the TDD (test driven development) types hit the nail on the head. By making code easy to test, the code becomes easy to use.

I think the only organization in the community with enough power and credibility to actually get this off the ground would be Zend, unless there is a strong power from the user community of course. I’d be very willing to work with others to get something like that off the ground.