Java/Bonobo and inter-orb communication [was: shipping Vera with 2.4]

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

> Sander Vesik wrote:
> > Onthe other hand, language binding to a large variety of 
> > languages for CORBA exist now
> 
> Well, specifications for language mappings exists, but each ORB needs its
> own implementation. Because GNOME chose to write its own ORB (ORBit) there
> are still very few language bindings for it. In fact I don't think there are
> any that are complete or stable, and the complication of CORBA means that
> it's unlikely that they will be finished any time soon.

I don't believe this is correct, my understanding is that a number of
fully CORBA-2.2-compliant ORBs are out there.  And I don't think there's
much of interest in CORBA-2.2 that ORBit2 doesn't do.

> 
> Personally I do wish we could use CORBA for all IPC but I recognise these
> practical problems:
> - CORBA in C is ridiculously difficult. GNOME uses C.
> - ORBit2, being a new ORB, has no other usable language bindings,
> particularly no complete C++ bindings for use by KDE.

As has been noted, ORBit2 fully supports Inter-Orb communication.

> ...

> . I suspect that this is part of the
> reason that we could never use a different CORBA ORB (maybe one with C++
> mappings) to do Bonobo programming. 

Not at all true; for instance there is quite a bit of Bonobo programming
(both client-side, and implementations of Bonobo services) in Java in
cvs module "java-access-bridge".  The Java bindings for Bonobo are
especially nice, really elegant.  Of course the Java VM uses its own
ORB, but it talks seamlessly to ORBit2 (thanks to a lot of debugging and
testing by Mark McLoughlin and Michael, etc.)

Anyone who says Bonobo APIs are hard to program to (especially if they
dislike Java ;)  should really give this a look, particularly the
client-side code in the 'test' directory. [Note that there is some
regression in the JNav client code at the moment due to the removal of a
dependency on gnome-speech, to solve a circular dependency issue, but
the sources are still valid.]

In fact the addition of a complete implementation of Bonobo::Unknown in
Java has already been discussed publicly and is planned very soon; the
implementation is already in java-access-bridge but it really needs to
be split out into its own module so that the several modules that are
already using Java Bonobo bindings can have a more rational dependency
graph.

> If we really wanted to use CORBA for simple system-wide IPC then I think we
> would have to reconsider our choices or ORBit and Bonobo. I don't think we
> want to do that.
> 
> Murray Cumming
> murrayc usa net
> www.murrayc.com

-- 
Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>