[omniORB] omniORB interoperable with different versions of itself?

[Duncan Grisby]

On Monday 31 May, Steve Bowman wrote:

> We've a concern regarding the upgrade of our products.
> We have a requirement that our customers are able to upgrade
> their systems piecemeal, i.e. that they are able to have
> concurrently running machines with different versions of our
> product (and hence potentially omniORB). Are there any
> guarantees regarding the interoperability of different
> versions of omniORB? Are there any known issues?

All versions of omniORB should interoperate. The only known issue is
that version 2.7 and above support TypeCode indirection, while
previous releases do not. This means that you can have difficulties if
you send items of type Any between 2.7 and earlier versions. The
message at

  http://www.uk.research.att.com/omniORB/archives/1999-02/0055.html

explains further.

> Does anyone know whether the OMG has made any undertaking to
> make changes to IIOP backwards-compatible?

All versions of omniORB currently use IIOP version 1.0, so there are
no IIOP version problems. Work is currently underway on IIOP 1.2,
which adds a number of new features. 1.2 is compatible with 1.0 in the
sense that 1.2's extensions are optional, not required. 1.2 only uses
the new features if it detects that the ORB at the other end also
supports 1.2.

Cheers,

Duncan.

-- 
 -- Duncan Grisby  \  Research Engineer  --
  -- AT&T Laboratories Cambridge          --
   -- http://www.uk.research.att.com/~dpg1 --