Re: CORBA

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi,

Sorry, I am back from Belgium, but not yet really up to speed with the
mailinglist.

On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 14:32 +0000, Andrew Haley wrote:
> The problem is that the OMG code is both a specification *and* an
> implementation; specs perhaps should be unmodifiable but
> implementations certainly not.  It's hard to know what to do.

We had some discussion off list between Chris, Dalibor and me in the
last couple of days about this. And we discussed it during Fosdem of
course. The main problem is that we don't have a real use case for these
classes. They seem to be in the standard but most people think they are
boring and not really necessary. But Jeffrey Morgan said he would like
to see Corba support to make it possible to interact with the Gnome
bonobo stuff (which would give us gnome-applets!). And you said Jonas
uses some of this. Do you have pointers to what precisely is needed?

Bascially we have two choices, which we can of course tackle in
parallel.
1) We use the specification and write a free implementation of it. Jeff
Bailey started work on this, I don't know the status of that. This
doesn't seem that much work actually since it would only be for the
org.omg interface classes which aren't that large actually. There are
just a lot of them. Most aren't difficult at all though. If we can
bridge these with an existing corba implementation like 
2) We ask the OMG to release their org.omg interface classes as
GPL-compatible free software and include them as external libraries with
GNU Classpath. Chris Burdess wanted to take a stab at that.

If Jeff and Chris could give us an update on their plans/progress then
others can help out more effectively. I and FSF legal can help out Chris
with formulating what would be needed from OMG, but knowing big
organisations this might be a long process. Just implementing the
org.omg classes ourselfs might actually be faster.

Cheers,

Mark

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part