CORBA for Squeak

Johan Fabry johan.fabry at vub.ac.be
Wed Oct 18 13:24:36 UTC 2000


Mark Guzdial wrote:

> At any rate, I'd like to plead again for someone (other than me) to port
> a Smalltalk CORBA ORB to Squeak.  At present, I'm devoting a large chunk
> of time to porting the Siren framework "back" to VisualWorks NC because
> I require CORBA interoperability. (We're developing a large-scale
> real-time CORBA DSP infrastructure that I want to be able to drive from
> Siren, no matter what Smalltalk platform Siren runs on.) Is there no-one
> else willing to elevate the severity of this "missing feature??"

It's a very interesting idea, and I am sure that a CORBA compliant ORB
for Squeak is a worthwhile asset. It would nicely extend the
capabilities of squeak in the network arena.

However (there has to be a 'however' :-)) CORBA (in my opinion) is no
fun. It is hard to learn (I teach some classes of our distributed
systems course, including the CORBA classes, and it is a repeating
pattern) and it is hard to use. Contrast Squeak, which is easy to learn,
and easy to use. I suspect Squeak developers will want to avoid all the
hassle (defining IDL's et cetera) of CORBA and yoyfully just code.

AFAIK it is not so hard to write a CORBA-compliant ORB, the difficulties
lie in the IDL compiler. Maybe you can omit the IDL compiler and use
some other, proprietary means to generate stub and skeleton classes
where neccessary.

--
"You are more than the sum       Johan Fabry - Johan.Fabry at vub.ac.be
 of what you consume.            Vrije Universiteit Brussel
 Desire is not an occupation."   Programming Technology Lab, Room 10F709
  -- KMFDM                       Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium





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