Iain Hanson <Iain.Hanson <at> videonetworks.com> writes:
Your position seems to be that programmers should not be afforded the
On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 22:59:43 +0000 (UTC), Jarl Lindrud wrote option
of
choosing; they should just bite the bullet and always use CORBA. If they don't like that, then they should just avoid networking altogether.
Personally I tend to prefer not letting programmers shoot themselves in the foot, if I can avoid it. Unfortunately, they ( and I sometimes ) are incredibly inventive at finding new ways to do so .
To sum up then, your position is that:
1) CORBA is the be-all and end-all of distributed programming.
2) Anything not projected to need CORBA-style scaleability is just a "toy" and not worthy of library support.
I guess you don't find much need for networking at all in Boost? At least not beyond lowlevel socket API wrappers and assorted utilites that might be useful for something like realtime socket apps. Anything beyond that can, and should, be done with CORBA, regardless of scale and scope.
Sorry I haven't had time to follow this whole thread, but I've written a few Corba and distributed programs over the years and I think there is a place for varying support levels. CORBA is way, way overkill for many simple applications (retrieve a web page, register a product on a remote site, snap some data from a server on startup, etc). There is hardly anyway to make a CORBA application light weight, it introduces the idl compiler, a whole set of new types, typically threading, etc. Also, the CORBA binding to C++ is a pain in my view -- someone could redo it with modern C++ and things would be much better, but I don't see anyone talking about that. But I digress. And Ian, you should be happy that people are messing up distributed apps -- means more employment for those that know how to fix things ;-) As for RPC, I can see Ian's point -- it's a slippery slope. You can quickly wind up reinventing the wheel yet again. That said, I think it's a line that can be walked, so I think you should keep going. But this will undoubtedly come up in the review, so you'll have to be really clear about the niche you are filling. Jeff ps: I haven't had a chance to look at your library yet...