Re: where is corba?

[Warren Young <tangent cyberport com>]

Elliot Lee wrote:
> 
> On 13 Aug 1999 14:46:02 -0400, Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
> <bogadofuture@openlink.com.br> wrote:
> 
> >       I was using gnorpm and gftp, and I figured why was gnorpm trying to
> >download the files for itself? Why he would not ask for gftp or better
> >yet gnome transfer manager, that uses wget) for a download using a corba
> >interface? I thing that should be a corba service for asking for
> >downloads and every app that needs a download could use it.
> 
> Why use CORBA for this? There is no data that needs to be shared between
> different applications - a shared library would do a much better job, and in
> this case, libghttp & libwww both exist and do the job (libwww being the
> "recommended" one for future apps).

A shared library would _work_ for this one case, but I wouldn't say it'd
be better.  There are two problems with shared libraries for this sort
of thing.  You either have to:

1. Link to a specific library by name when building the program.  This
ties your program to a particular implementation.

Or:

2. Define an API like XMMS does and allow the user to choose from one of
the available libraries that implements that API.  In this case, it'd be
a file transferring API.

A CORBA component would fix both of these problems, because you can just
look up an implementation of a given interface by name.  "Give me a file
transfer component", your program says, and the ORB figures out how to
satisfy that request.  Maybe the back end will be implemented by gftp,
maybe by Midnight Commander, and maybe it'll be a custom dedicated
component.  Your program doesn't know or care, so long as it satisfies
the required interface.
-- 
= Warren 
= ICBM Address: 36.8274040 N, 108.0204086 W, alt. 1714m