[omniORB] COM-omniORB Interface

[David Morgenlender]

Sai-Lai,

>Given your requirements, I think a COM-CORBA mediator running
>on the client machine is quite an attractive proposition:
>
> +-------------+                 +----------------------------+
> |  ETS-Kernel |                 |     Windows NT/95          |
> |             |                 |                            |
> | +-------+   |                 |  +---------+   +-------+   |
> | |       |   |   CORBA         |  |         |COM|       |   |
> | | server|<---------------------->| mediator|<->| GUI   |   |
> | |       |   |                 |  |         |   | app	  |   |
> | |       |   |                 |  |         |   |       |   |
> | +-------+   |                 |  +---------+   +-------+   |
> |             |                 |                            |
> +-------------+                 +----------------------------+
>
>
>I do not have any experience with using any COM-CORBA bridge
>product so I can't comment on this approach.
>
>However, I think it is not difficult to handcraft the mediator
>using omniORB2 and the COM support that comes with VC++.
>It is simply a matter of writing wrappers to call from COM to
>omniORB2 stubs and vice versa.=20

Actually, yesterday I made the decision to write it myself.  The client
concurred.  It came down to the fact that an attempt to purchase a 3rd =
party
bridge had some chance of saving a little work, and some chance of =
creating a
lot of additional work.  I felt there was a fairly high probability of =
losing a
lot of time trying to get a 3rd party app purchased & working, perhaps =
even
ending up discarding it.  We have a fairly limited number of function =
calls (on
the order of 30), which won't be changing a lot.

>By keeping the server interface in OMG IDL, you keep the door
>open to move to non-win32 GUIs. Perhaps quite soon, your client
>will prefer a pure java-based GUI!

One never knows <g>!

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Dave Morgenlender
e-mail: dmorgen@alum.mit.edu
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