using thread unsafe third party code

[Renzo Tomaselli]

Hi people, a couple of questions for you:

1. I'm collecting comments about how to setup a server architecture made up
of mixed, thread-safe and unsafe services. Thinking of objects clustered
into dynamically loadable services (such as DLLs on NT), a very basic
bootstrap ORB might load them on demand (such as local/remote
configurations requests); this loading interface should be embedded into
the ORB, like the actual OmniORB nameservice. This is the easy part, the
real troubles come out whenever a requested service links to thread-unsafe
third party software, such as a RDBMS library; in this case the
implementation might wrap each call into lock/unlock mutex brackets (strict
sequentialization), or resort to the old multiprocessing scheme (such as
ftpd). The latter case would require the ORB to spawn processes instead of
threads, in order to avoid doubling the marshalling toward a more internal,
implementation dependent interprocess comm. layer; however this solution
would be tightly coupled to the idea of "connection".

2. (for the developers); the implementations of  "any" is of a fundamental
importance for implementing almost any COSS service. Any scheduling for
related OmniORB support ? (I'm not pushing anyone, just wanting to know :-)

Any comment is more than welcome,


		Renzo Tomaselli      
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