I'm not even remotely a CORBA-compliant programmer, so take what I say with
a few tons of salt, but my recollection is that Apple's Cocoa framework
provides interoperability with CORBA without needing to learn CORBA. How is
this done? Couldn't Squeak provide the same kinds of services?


on 10/18/00 6:24 AM, Johan Fabry at johan.fabry at vub.ac.be wrote:

> 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.

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