In a few months, a corporation success is going to be measured by its ability to open its systems and transact with several hundreds to several thousands business partners. This problem can be viewed as another integration problem, but it is actually more than that. The number of systems to integrate requires the definition and wide acceptance of standards from middleware to business protocols and semantic. In addition to guarantied message delivery, companies must now acknowledge the validity of the messages and its acceptance. HTML and the current web-architecture are not well suited to exchange business information in a reliable and secure fashion.
Objects don t allow independent evolutions in autonomous business units.
The lifecycle of some business objects is very long and have to evolve as business environment changes. Methods, data structure and datatypes are all attached to the class definition. Referring to an external entity with proprietary encoding is an important issue in the development of highly distributed systems. Objective-C and SmallTalk have partially solved the problem by providing a semantic based method invocation. However, instance's data structure is still constrained to a class structure.