[omniORB] Objects by value?

[Duncan Grisby]

On Tuesday 3 April, henning.schmidt@philips.com wrote:

> Is it possible to specify a full-blown class as a data-types that I
> can use as input/output parameter (not just a struct)?

As others have already mentioned, CORBA valuetypes would provide some
of that functionality, in the sense that you could pass objects with
methods by value. That is, however, very different from being able to
take an arbitrary C++ class and transmit it.

There is, of course, a problem with transmitting objects with methods,
since there is no guarantee that the receiving side will have
implementations of those methods. In theory, Java ORBs could transmit
the code, although I believe none of them currently do. The same could
be done for Python, but I don't think it's especially useful to
restrict use of a type to a single language.

omniORB doesn't support valuetypes yet anyway, so this is all rather
moot. The work on omniORB 4 is providing the infrastructure which will
make it possible to implement valuetype, but it is extremely unlikely
that omniORB 4.0 will support it.

Cheers,

Duncan.

-- 
 -- Duncan Grisby  \  Research Engineer  --
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