Hello Jon, Jonathan Biggar wrote:
I've been working on a C++ CORBA implementation for a long time. I've considered making it open source in the past, but I hadn't seen the exact niche for it to fill.
Now that Boost 1.35 is out, including ASIO and the new Threads implementation, I'm considering retargeting my implementation to only use boost libraries for underlying services.
I'd be quite happy to contribute my implementation to boost, if there's enough interest for me to proceed.
So, what do you all think?
That's wonderful! (I am so happy also because I know, being a long-time CORBA user, the expertise of Jonathan and his contributions to the standard). Some considerations: - I think that many on this list underestimate the importance that CORBA has still today. For large client-server/distributed applications there aren't yet many valid alternatives. - The main benefit of CORBA is its cross-platform, cross-language nature: our C++ distributed application is accessible through C++, Java, Python, COM, .Net in Solaris, Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. - There are very good open-source implementations, like TAO and OmniORB, with great support facilities. - The main drawback of CORBA is probably its awkward C++ binding (as Jon said, there were many /historic/ reasons). I know that an effort for a new binding began some months ago at OMG: I am not updated on that one. TAO is a robust implementation based on ACE. ACE is a large C++ framework, which implements many network-related pattens. Boost is now entering the ACE's territory with a much more modern C++ perspective but it still lacks many features (waiting for pion-net/cpp-netib, log et al.). But, as Jon said, Boost has now the functionalities needed to build an ORB. I see many benefits about a Boost ORB: - A modern C++ implementation -