Miguel de Icaza miguel@ximian.com
21 Sep 2002 17:03:33 -0400
Hello,

Yes, we would be interested in a CORBA implementation, and it seems like
you have done some progress on your CORBA implementation.

You might want to take advantage of a feature in .NET called "Remoting"
(look at the various remoting*.cs files in mono/mono/tests).  With this
it is possible to implement skeleton-less corba implementations.

Miguel.
Michael Meeks michael@ximian.com
23 Sep 2002 11:36:41 +0100
Hi Sergio,

On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 19:36, Sergio Perani wrote:
> I started an implementation of a CORBA ORB for .Net framework, that 
> should work also with Mono.

	It would be great if you could re-use the ORBit2 infrastructure; for
many reasons:

	a) Code re-use, while marshalling is fairly trivial, there is a 
	   great wealth of problems that you can hit, particularly:
		* Interoperability - lots of subtlties here
		* Profile management - fun stuff here too
		* Socket communications - similarly
		* Security ... etc.

	b) In-proc ABI, ORBit2 has an ABI that would let C bindings for
	   Mono objects not go through a complex Marshal to a socket,
	   de-marshal from a socket [ even in-proc ] process, but do 
	   direct cross language calls, between eg. Guile, Python,
	   Mono, C

	My main concern is a) really, code-reuse; this is rather more important
to my mind than a 'pure' Mono impl.

	Regards,

		Michael.
Sergio Perani sergio@behemot.it
Wed, 25 Sep 2002 19:14:13 +0200
Hi Michael,

A little history about harmless...
at the beginning I was looking for an open source
ORB implementation and I was not interested in start a new project.
I found only VBOrb, but the author does not want to support VB.Net;
I tried to modify it  and I found several problems to recompile VBOrb 
source code with VB7.
I also looked also at mono site and I exchanged messages with David Taylor.
.
I need to use c# to write client applications of an existing set
of servers that use CORBA. I am very near to obtain this result with 
harmless.
In several cases a pure CLR implementation is required.
But, related to your remarks, I think point b) is very important,
and I could contribuite on that. But this result seems to me very difficult
to achieve for mono/.NET VM. I have download Orbit2 and I will give a look.

A question about Orbit: why does not exist a mapping for java?

Thanks,
Sergio
Miguel de Icaza miguel@ximian.com
25 Sep 2002 13:52:34 -0400
Hello,

Although this would be useful, a pure managed implementation of CORBA
would simplify the deployment of CORBA, and could get more people in the
Microsoft world to use it.

To make things even more interesting, if a .NET remoting CORBA binding
is produced, it will allow people using Microsoft.NET to easily
integrate with existing CORBA environments.

Code reuse is really not that important to me for this particular case. 
For instance, just wrapping ORBit and mapping things to C# will be a lot
of overhead.

Miguel