Re: How to gnome/CORBA?

[Philip Dawes <philipd parallax co uk>]

J. Lupion wrote:
> 
> On 5 Feb 1998, Jim Pick wrote:
> 
> > Build lots of "services" that all the different apps can use so that we
> > have an extremely configurable, customizeable, lightweight system.
> 
> How ´light´ will it be?  I mean, will it bring a P150 down
> to its knees?  All those dandy-peachy features are OK, but
> what when it comes to talk about performance?
> 

It can be very light. In fact as light as a shared library is. If you
require good performance from a corba object server you can stick it in
a shared library and the goa (object adaptor) will transparently connect
it to your process, drop the functionality into your address space and
then get out of the way while you call methods (functions) on it
*directly*.

Mico has this feature as an addition to the boa (basic object adaptor)
spec - they call it library activation mode. I don't know whether the
new poa (portable object adaptor) spec supports this activation mode.

While we're on the subject of bloat and performance, I actually expect
to see a drop in memory footprints of 'applications' once we get
something resembling a document architecture. One of the percieved
benefits of opendoc was that medium-scale application tasks like dtp,
spreadsheets and word processing could be accomplished with binary
footprints in the tens of k ballpart. This is because the user can build
up their application from parts depending on the task they want to
perform, so they can leave out all of the unnecessary functionality. 

The opendoc book I'm reading also speculated that part providers would
actually compete on binary size, since the user would be able to see and
make judgements on whether the unit part component was 'bloated' or not,
rather than just being told that an application is feature packed and to
be pleased about the 12meg footprint.

Incidently I don't expect to see Ole/Active X fulfill the potentual of a
document architecture - it just doesn't make business sense for
Microsoft to break up its applications into small chunks so that other
companies can compete on a level playing field. In fact the opposite is
true - they like to lock out competitors by bundling lots of
functionality into huge monolithic 'suites' so that the customer has no
ability to chop and change. 
Ever tried to use the visual C++ compiler with metrowerks codewarrior
ide? Didn't think so.

Cheers,

Phil.

-- 
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 Phil Dawes                               |   My opinions are my own
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