As a former CORBA user, I'm just concerned that there is not a real need for an ORB from Boost. The only way I could see it being more useful than others would be if it changed the current C++ bindings, as mentioned by a previous post (Bjarne Stroustrup has mentioned this too). This would take a lot of work, and it might only be feasible with the support of the C++ standards committee or the OMG. In addition, CORBA does seem to be rather out of fashion (I don't know how much of that is just because of the API, or better marketing from the latest fads). Working on other extensions to Boost.Asio would probably be more useful. Not to discourage you, but I think it may be better to focus energies elsewhere. Jeremy Pack On 3/6/07, Ames Andreas <Andreas.Ames@comergo.com> wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: boost-bounces@lists.boost.org [mailto:boost-bounces@lists.boost.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Garland Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 4:32 PM Subject: Re: [boost] [soc] orb project was (asio projects)
Stefan Seefeld wrote:
Jeff Garland wrote: Out of curiosity: What's the relationship between an ORB and boost.org, and why would boost.org want to have its own ?
Good question. Some would probably like to have an ORB
I'd say, there is no such relation. As I said before, I don't think a useful ORB implementation would be doable in 3 month (or even thirteen months). The proposal as it stands is not practical (if such a thing as a Boost ORB would be considered useful at all).
I propose a different project, maybe as a subproject of 'Implementing application level protocols using asio'.
Proposal --------
Implement GIOP 1.2 on top of asio
Introduction ------------
GIOP is commonly used as an communications protocal between CORBA ORBs. Unfortunately the programming model that CORBA exposes is cumbersome (although portable and language agnostic). Furthermore standard CORBA doesn't provide an asynchronous API on the server side. This project should create a strictly asynchronous API for low-level GIOP programming on top of boost's asio library.
Goal ----
The library created by this project should enable writing servers and/or clients purely in C++ (i.e. without IDL etc.) that can communicate with CORBA ORB implementations (analogy: you can implement HTTP communications without a SOAP framework).
The protocol is well documented and features only eight message types.
Additional points of interest:
* The lib should cleanly seperate OSI layer 7 (GIOP messages) from layer 6 (CDR). Layer 6 could perhaps be implemented as a serialization archive.
* Only IIOP and TCP as transport layer is of interest.
* The lib should/could provide a whole range of customisation points such that the user can directly control possibly every aspect of message assembly down to the bitstream. This could be useful to test ORB applications.
* The implementation should provide backwards compatibility to GIOP 1.0 and 1.1.
* An optional goal could be to show off the interoperability of the protocol implementation by providing a simple 'transparent' gateway between a traditional CORBA object and a traditional CORBA client (like between the usual 'echo' object and its client)
Requirements: ------------
Knowledge or the ability to become acquainted with:
* C++
* Selected Boost libraries (at least asio and serialization, hopefully others)
* Event-driven programming
* Understanding and implementing network protocols
cheers,
aa
-- Andreas Ames | Programmer | Comergo GmbH | ames AT avaya DOT com
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