omniORB development

[Sai-Lai Lo]

>>>>> Chris Hafey writes:
>
> Could someone at ORL answer the following questions:
> 
> a) Which features are currently under development and when can they be 
>    expected? (I know about DII/DSI/Type Any, but when are they due?)
> b) What is ORL's position in regard to future omniORB development?  Is ORL
>    getting out of ORB development or will resources be allocated?

omniORB is under active development at ORL:

1. We are using it in the system software of our radio ATM system; in
   sensor systems and resources monitors that aim to provide systems
   support for advanced personalisation; and in building a large scale
   multimedia information retrieval system etc.

2. We want our ORB to handle continuous media efficently. We are
   developing a GIOP over native ATM transport. Soon, we'll start on a
   shared memory transport and a SCI transport. To support these "special"
   transports, we are investigating an explicit binding model that allows
   applications to tell the ORB what to do by specifying the requirements
   as quality of service parameters.

It is our objective to implement most, if not all, of the functionalities
specified in the CORBA core. We do not intend to develop in-house the full
taxomony of the COS services except those that are essential to our
research work and cannot be purchased from other vendors. On the other
hand, we very much welcome others to develop more COS services and make
them available for free under GPL. To this end, we'll provide the necessary
hooks in the ORB to facilitate the development of these
services. (Personally, I hope someone can take up the baton and implements
the security service.)


Timetable ?
  - Give us three months to deliver Any and TypeCode. 
  - Expect no further BOA development as it is going to be superseded by POA. 
  - Proper ORB shutdown and better connection management soon.
  - Support for LifeCycle service soon.
  - Not sure when we can start working on POA. Authentication support comes
    higher on the list.


Regards,

Sai-Lai Lo

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