Trial Balloon: A new DataStore Architecture?

[mike.perik@bankofamerica.com]

CORBA oneway calls are not guaranteed.

Mike

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Jonathan Blandford [SMTP:jrb@redhat.com]
> Sent:	Tuesday, October 31, 2000 2:28 PM
> To:	Derek Atkins
> Cc:	Rob Browning; gnucash-devel@gnucash.org
> Subject:	Re: Trial Balloon: A new DataStore Architecture?
> 
> 
> <delurk>
> 
> Hi Derek,
> 
> While I'm hardly a CORBA expert, I'd like to reply to some of these
> comments.
> 
> Derek Atkins <warlord@MIT.EDU> writes:
> 
> > Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> writes:
> > 
> > > On the data communication side, there's also CORBA to consider.
> > 
> > I personally dislike CORBA.  My reasoning is two-fold:
> > 
> > 	1) Synchronous RPC is BAD (in many cases).
> > 
> > 	2) CORBA tries to push protocol design onto programmers.. But
> >            good programmers are not necessarily good protocol
> >            designers (and vice-versa).
> > 
> > A real-world example of this: M$ Outlook requires 84 RPC calls to open
> > a mail folder.  If your mail server is a few hundred miles away, it
> > can take, literally, several SECONDS in order to open it.  Why?  The
> > program has to pause and wait for each RPC to finish before it can
> > make the next request, and the transmission delay time can be
> > relatively large in a widely-distributed network.
> 
> 84 RPC calls?  That's pretty heavy, regardless of the protocol or
> mechanism.  But that aside, CORBA has the oneway directive that lets you
> send asynchronous requests.
> 
> > A real protcol would let you send multiple requests consecutively and
> > let the responses come asynchronously.  Unfortunately CORBA does not
> > let you do this.
> 
> Yes it can.  You can send multiple oneway requests, and let the remote
> object send oneway replies back.
> 
> > Another potential problem is the security of CORBA.. Namely, there is
> > none.:) I would personally insist on data encryption and strong
> > (kerberos-level or greater) user authentication.
> 
> I'd argue that writing my own protocol is less secure, as there's more
> complexity in the code, more room for error, it's one more dependency on
> the system etc. etc.  At least with ORBit, there are a number of other
> people using it.  Additionally, ORBit 2.0 has support for SSL built in.
> Authentication is a separate kettle of fish, and needs addressing
> independent of the protocol used.
> 
> > Frankly, I don't think that designing a real protocol would be
> > difficult.  I also don't think it needs to happen right away.  I think
> > we can architect and implement the data model using local storage
> > before designing the network protocol.  At least a set of access
> > requirements should come first.
> 
> Thanks,
> -Jonathan
> 
> </delurk>
> 
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