Re: getting started

[Martin Pool <mbp wistful humbug org au>]

On Tue, Aug 25, 1998 at 07:37:22PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> About Monday I am hoping to start CORBA-izing Guppi (or at least
> attempting to do so). Problem is I have minimal clue what that might
> involve. :-) Tomorrow morning I am going to the bookstore to look for
> relevant books. 

I bought a copy of "Corba Distributed Objects Using Orbix" by Se\'an
Baker (Addison Wesley), ISBN 0-201-92475-7I found it a nice tutorial
for an experienced programmer who didn't know much about Orbix.

Mico comes with some examples, but they're pretty simple.

In fact, I've found the biggest problem in trying to learn about this
stuff is: "OK, I know how to write Hello World.  What's a useful
design pattern for a desktop app?"

I've been wondering if it would be worth reading a bit about
OLE/ActiveX for inspiration.

All of the specifications are available for download from www.omg.org
if you dig deep enough.  They're pretty readable, but they're
definitely specifications, not tutorials.

> A concrete question: is CORBA something well-standardized like C, such
> that any book will do, or does it have significant ORB-specific aspects?

My (very non-expert) assessment is that CORBA is roughly as
well-standardized as C, or perhaps slightly less well: there is a
specification and standards body, but they leave quite a few details
of syntax and semanticsup to the implementor.  When moving between
different OSs in C you might have to allow for endianness, word size,
and different libraries.  When moving between ORBs you might have to
allow for slightly different interpretations of the spec or function
names.   All IIOP implementations ought to be compatible.

I hear from friends who work with CORBA a lot that current commercial
implementations work well but do have problems: organizations that are
serious about it try very hard to get source licenses.  So, it seems
to me like there's a lot of room for the many-eyes debugging advantage
of a GPL'd ORB.

> Does anyone have suggestions on what to do/read? Specs? What books did you
> learn from? Source code?

That's my two cents, anyhow.  I too would love to hear the architects'
vision for CORBA in GNOME.

-- 
Martin Pool