C bindings for OmniORB?

[Philip Dawes]

Bart Schuller wrote:
> 
> Consider also that you can use an Interface Repository instead of an IDL
> parser. That's what I did for my Perl Orb. Walking a tree of objects and
> generating source code should be a fun project in almost every language.
> 
> In more detail:
> To compile an IDL file, I first start an IR process (which prints its
> object reference). The IR which comes with OmniBroker has the option to
> parse an IDL file, so that's what I use.
> Then I have my code generator, which is a CORBA client for the IR, read
> the object reference for the IR, and that's all you need: to the code
> generator, it's as if it has a tree of local objects corresponding to
> entities found in the IDL file.
> 
> And you see, it doesn't matter if which implementation of the IR you
> use, as long as it works.
> 
> I had great fun bootstrapping the whole process, writing just enough
> stub functions by hand to get the client support for the IR working :-)
> 

This becomes a bit more difficult when you're dealing with 'free' (as in
the FSF sense) projects like gnome, (Please, no discussions of freeness
here - this one's been done to death), since OmniBroker isn't 'free'
enough. Mico has a similar facility with its idl compiler which can feed
its IR, but the gnome project really wants a small fast orb with lots of
languages - at the moment mico doesn't fit this bill either, and having
two orbs present in the system is a bit out of the question at the
moment.

So that leaves either porting mico's IR for omniorb, or writing one from
scratch (or both). Problem is that omniorb doesn't have Typecode and
'Any' support in the current snapshot. Sai Lai said:

> ... Our plan is to have 2.4.0 out
> first and then follows by a snapshot with Typecode and Any. At the moment,
> I'm updating omniORB documentations. This is the last thing to do before
> 2.4.0 is released.

And we need that to be able to compile the corba idl for IR. Any chance
of a sneak preview on that code Sai-Lai?

Cheers,

Phil.

-- 
_______________________________________________________________________
 Phil Dawes                               |   My opinions are my own
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