UI independance

[Alex Barclay]

Dave Peticolas wrote:

>On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 19:20, Alex Barclay wrote:
>  
>
>>Derek Atkins wrote:
>>One of the applications I would like to produce at some point is a 
>>general ledger running on my palm. When I sync it would upload its data 
>>to the gnucash engine. If we went with a raw socket interface I'd be 
>>left writing the interface code. If we went with SOAP I'd be left 
>>writing the XML messages. If we go with CORBA I can use the current 
>>object mapping and concentrate only on my app.
>>    
>>
>
>Not that I am advocating SOAP, or any other method, but this
>is a misleading statement. You might as well say 'If we go
>with CORBA, I'd be left writing the CORBA messages by
>hand'. Of course, no one would do that since you could
>use a CORBA library to do that for you. And that is precisely
>what you would do with SOAP. There are several free SOAP
>libraries available, for different languages.
>  
>
I'm certainly not advocating this at all. What I'm saying is that CORBA 
has a very well defined object model. Even if I had a library to 
implement the message encodings I would loose all of the benefits of 
that model especially with respect to things like object lifetimes. So 
far I've used CORBA from C++, Smalltalk, Perl and CORBA Script - you'll 
notice that C is absent from this list but I'm sure it won't be too 
difficult.

Interworking is also a problem. CORBA defines bindings for many 
languages where SOAP implementations vary - which to my mind puts SOAP 
exactly where CORBA was before POA. No source level interoperability - 
which to my mind is a huge loss. This is not a problem with COM because 
that is only done by Micro$oft. On one of my last projects we dumped 
Orbix and went over to ACE/TAO with very little pain entirely because 
both implemented the same object model. We also did our conversion on a 
piecemeal basis because there was interoperability between the two ORBs.


Alex.