Re: Difference between CORBA and shared library

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On 26 Mar 2001 15:03:00 +1200, Franck Martin wrote:
> Hi,
>  
> I'm reading the doc about CORBA and orbit, and I'm trying to figure out
> several things. The documentation on various site is really for beginners,
> it just shows it works, not what you can do.
>  
> I would like to understand in particularity what is the main difference
> between using CORBA and creating a shared library. Can you build a CORBA
> shared library? It seems that the people of gnome-db have done that, but if
> it is a library how the calls are made through the IIOP to the library? Is
> the distributed part lost?
>  

GNORBA and OAF (the 2 object activation systems in GNOME) when they have
to activate an object which is in a shared library, they load a small
driver program which activates the object in the library.

In gnome-db, that's the way it's done, but the small driver program is
implemented by us, so the gnome-db CORBA objects are all implemented as
separated processes, although it's possible to load them as shared
libraries, since the real CORBA implementation is in the shared library,
and not in the small driver program.

BTW, DON'T USE GNORBA, use OAF instead, since GNORBA is deprecated.

> Lastly do I really need IDL to discover what interface and methods a module
> provides. Can I do it at run time? Do I have to code something inside the
> stubs created by orbit-idl or is it taken care of for me?
>  
I think there's something in CORBA (Interface repository?) to discover interfaces

at run time, but I think it's not implemented in ORBit. Please somebody
correct me if I'm wrong.

cheers

-- 
Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org> <rodrigo ximian com>
http://www.gnome-db.org/