Re: the GNORBA library

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Joerg Budischewski <joerg budischewski germany sun com> writes:

>
> I think, we agree on that the only thing that prevents someone from using 
> oaf over iiop only is that one does not have the IOR of it. So I think it 
> would be a good idea to have something in the system that allows to get 
> the IOR easily (not only for UNO, but also for other orb vendors). In my 
> eyes, a command line tool would be sufficient.

It's not just the IOR (I think there is actually already an easy way
to get that by looking in a defined place in the filesystem, will post
more details shortly). The liboaf library also does additional work
besides just making the CORBA calls.

The most significant examples of this are the code to auto-launch oafd
if not already running and register it, and the code to activate
shared-library objects (which inherently has to run on the client, not
the server).

However, I'd really like OAF to be usable mostly or entirely through
CORBA. I will look at what it would take to make that work. The
published CORBA interface may not be the same as the OAF internal
CORBA interfaces.

> >I also
> > thought SO was switching to CORBA rather than sticking with UNO, but I
> > suppose that is beside the point.
> You can see the bridge as a first step towards this.
> 
> However, my personal opinion is, that merging the core of both component 
> models in one process is not possible because of the technical 
> differences. A bridge allows a similiar level of integration and 
> preserves the advantages of both systems ( this does not reflect the 
> opinions of my bosses ).

This brings up the interesting case of shlib CORBA objects. I think we
may need an out-of-process proxy which could activate and host shlib
objects for bridge purposes; this will also be useful for language
bindings and things like Bonobo<-->KParts or Bonobo<-->XPCOM bridges.

Elliot mentioned something about this being way too hard in a stray
comment in OAF, but it seems quite doable to me.

Regards,

Maciej