RE: Java/Bonobo and inter-orb communication [was: shipping Vera w ith 2.4]

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

> 	Murray's problems with cross language implementation 
> inheritance are very real though

I don't think we really have a problems with cross-language implementation
inheritance. Bonobomm works already. Our problems are either
a) orbitcpp is difficult to complete.
b) replacing orbitcpp with another ORB (e.g. mico) that has C++ already
seems difficult.

And also that bonobo's apparent lack of documentation and examples makes it
difficult for us to know what public APIs exist and how/when to use them, so
it's difficult to know how compete our bindings are.

If the use of another ORB is really possible then I think our current
implementation-inheritance system would continue to work there - because we
just get a reference to the base implementation via CORBA and call its
methods via CORBA from our C++ server's methods.

Maybe I'll try to implement a component with Mico sometime. Despite what
Bill says I'm not very confident that it's going to be possible without the
C sugar that's tied to ORBit.

> - Murray - since I havn't 
> time to sit down and head-scratch on it, do you have any 
> ideas as to what we can do to improve the situation

We need to make it clear what's CORBA and what's sugar, what's generated and
what's not, what's interface and what's implementation. The CORBA interfaces
need to be documented. Yes, I know that I have offered to do some of this
work in the past. It was more difficult than I thought. Bonobomm is half of
that job though. To be honest, I have hoped that Bonobomm would just present
a more coherent API and we could then forget about the Bonobo mess
underneath. But it's not happening quickly.

> - beyond 
> waiting for the XML stuff to be folded to
> Gtk+ in Gnome 2.6 - and then re-structuring it ?

I think it makes sense to wait for that. In itself, that should make Bonobo
much simpler. I believe Bonobo got too big too fast - it should have been
refactored when it was small. I hope it will be small again. I am ranting, I
know.

Murray Cumming
murrayc usa net
www.murrayc.com