[omniORB] destroying objects implementations

[Sai-Lai Lo]

Renzo and Peter,

I think both of you are describing a similar distributed garbage collection
problem in different ways. An alternative way of looking at this is session
management. One opens a session on the server, creates lots of state on
it. If one close the session, one wants all the state to be cleared. We
have discussed this topic on this mailing list in the past several times so
I won't repeat it again. Please search the archive for the relevant
postings.

However, I must say that relying on the state of a file descriptor deep
inside the ORB to do session management is definitely not a good
idea. There are better ways to do this and is 100% CORBA. Again go and have
look at our archive for the relevant postings.

I think the distributed garbage collection problem Renzo is referring to is
one example of a number of distributed programming tasks that can benefit
from making into reusable components that can just be incorporated into
your application if needed. Another example is object state caching. There
is a whole range of protocols and techniques invented by the distributed
system research community more than a decade ago! What is needed now is to
make it possible to incorporate these protocols and techniques in a CORBA
friendly way.

Our group is interested in doing just that. The approach we are taking
is to use a combination of IDL annotations, auto-code generation based on
the IDL annotations, and a runtime library to drive the protocols. The IDL
annotation will be completely compatible with OMG IDL. The auto-code
generation may even be used on other ORBs but it will run much faster if
the ORB is omniORB. At the moment, I see no problem releasing our work in
this area in the same spirit as we have done so with omniORB2.

As this user group continue to use CORBA in real life problems, my hope is
that the combined experience will enable us to crystalise the class of
recurring distributed programming issues that will benefit from creating
tools and libraries to make the tasks easier.

Sai-Lai



-- 
Sai-Lai Lo                                   S.Lo@uk.research.att.com
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