At 12:06 PM -0500 12/10/98, Mark Guzdial wrote:
> At 1:02 AM -0500 12/10/98, Ivan Brusic wrote:
>>On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, David Farber wrote:
>>
>>> i do have a proposal, though. since there are so many of us with such good
>>> ideas and so little time, i reccomend that we ask (politely, but with that
>>> tone of voice that clearly indicate that we are not going to take no for an
>>> answer) Mark G. to start lending us his undergrads as 
>>> implementation slaves.
>>
>>I think that is a great idea!  Uh, wait, something is not quite right
>>here...
>
> Oh fine -- get me in trouble with the students! :-)  (You should hear the
> grief I'm getting over in the Squeakers list!)
>
> More seriously: If you can define some specific tasks that you need to get
> CORBA support in Squeak, I can:
> - Consider them for class assignments (if they're pedagogically useful, and
> you can use 100 different implementations :-)
> - Suggest them as extra credit assignments for my class
> - Post them on my list of project suggestions.  We have a requirement for
> undergraduate design/research projects, and that's the source for some
> wonderful things like Ross Philipson's PWS Admin utility.
> - Ask if any of the Georgia Tech Squeakers wants to take on the task.
>
> There is interest among the students here for CORBA support in Squeak --
> it's one of the more common questions I get from students who want to use
> Squeak in their co-op jobs.
>
> Mark
>
> --------------------------
> Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
> (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
> http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html

Key targets would be:
  - Design of Smalltalk IDL mappings (I think a prelim one already 
exits on www.omg.org.)
  - Design of IIOP to be implemented under Squeak
  - Design of IDL compiler to translate standard IDL to program 
skeleton and stub coded in Smalltalk/Squeak (with associated design 
of the skeleton and stub).
  - Design of a Naming Service implemented under Squeak.

That would give you pretty much the core features of an ORB and 
enough to be able to get something running to interface to other 
non-Squeak ORBs (which is what CORBA is all about anyway ;-) ). 
After that, you can deal with other services, etc.