DB design document

[Al Snell]

On Thu, 21 Dec 2000 linas@linas.org wrote:

> > investigate using ONC RPC as the marshalling system, which is much
> > less overhead than CORBA, 
> 
> Its not obvious to me that any RPC has lower overhead than corba.
> I'm tempted to beleive the opposite.

No way - RPC is far more lightweight than CORBA.

> Besides, remember that corba was invented to solve many of the evils
> and lack of function that rpc didn't/couldn't do.

Not true... CORBA is just RPC with an object model intestead of a
procedural model. Which is a high level distinction. The problem is that
IIOP is a much more complex protocol than ONC RPC, and harder to manage,
which is what makes ORBs bloated.

> > have ONC RPC available) so we wont have to worry about portability.
> 
> all platforms have corba as well.

Mine doesn't - I had to install it from a package on NetBSD.

> > obtain the lists of accounts, groups, etc.  And we also need to
> > discuss the data write APIs, and data cache conherency (events &
> > notifications?)
> 
> This is one reason I nominated corba.  Many (but not all) of the api 
> questions melt away, with an 'obvious' answer.   

Same with RPC, though... what do you perceive as the differences between
CORBA and RPC?

> Note events & notifications should work in corba, & I don't know how
> to do them with RPC, except as polls.

Callbacks are pretty standard. How would you do them in CORBA?

> --linas

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software