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Re: [dist-obj] CORBA implementation ideas

At 05:43 PM 12/15/98 -0500, Eskelin, Philip wrote:
>Now that the fire is roaring, I might as well put my marshmallows in too ;-)

Oops, I think they're burned to a crisp! :-)

>>From Nov 97 to June 98 I was involved in primarily the front end of a
>project that consisted of NT with a third-party contact management
>application that we extended with ActiveX controls.  We used VC++ 5.0/MFC, a
>third-party grid control, and Orbix Desktop 2.03.  The Orbix part was used
>as middleware to communicate with an application server on a Solaris box.
>Here are some problems and cool things we ran into:
[snip]

Because of the fact that I work for IONA, it's inevitable that Orbix issues
will be raised in CORBA discussions that I'm involved in. I wish that
weren't true, of course, but I know there are issues and, trust me, I'm
busting my ass over here to fix them. I wonder, though, whether we should
turn this conversation on this mailing list into a "I hate ORB XYZ
because..." tempest -- frankly, I'm not sure a lot of people here are
interested in such details, and those that are can simply jump over to
comp.object.corba. (But then again, I'm not the moderator, and I could be
wrong, so maybe I should just be quiet. :-) )

>1) If I'm not mistaken, IIOP stands for Internet Inter-Orb Protocol.

The term "Internet" in this context is mostly marketing hype.

>Sure,
>it was supposed to work over the Internet, but DID THEY THINK ABOUT
>FIREWALLS?  I know, Wonderwall is supposed to address this, but anybody who
>designs a protocol that works from one port then randomly assigns subsequent
>ports wasn't thinking firewalls in real businesses trying to build really
>secure business applications.

There is the new Firewall stuff in the OMG which was largely driven by
Wonderwall, but I do not know the details. (After all, there's only 29
hours in the day (when employing "Doug Schmidt time distortion," of course)).

>In my subjective opinion, CORBA took many different companies (with many
>differing political, technical, and business imperatives) and created a
>standard that many different vendors are attempting to implement in many
>different and incompatible ways.  Interoperability even in a single vendor
>between ORB versions is sometimes very difficult or not supported.

There are some strong movements being made towards the implementation of a
CORBA branding program that will ensure specification compliance among all
the supposed "CORBA compliant" ORB products. Products that do not comply do
not get the brand, pure and simple. I believe this will help.

>This has resulted in an architecture (CORBA) that makes it harder, not
>easier, to develop solutions.  Microsoft Research -- in addition to many
>other efforts already mentioned in this thread -- are trying to abstract the
>programmer from needing to deal with distributed programming issues to make
>their lives easier and more productive, not harder, when developing
>solutions.

We are too, believe me.

--steve

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