[omniORB] A Stab at Python COM-to-CORBA Binding Generation

[uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com]

> Having tried to find a free (or even evaluatable) CORBA-to-COM bridge
> and failed, I did some experimentation and realized that writing a COM
> wrapper in Python for CORBA objects was pretty easy with OmniORB and
> omniidl (scarily easy, actually). The only complication I've found so
> far is that our "top-level" class cannot be auto-generated, as it is the
> one class that establishes the initial CORBA connection (or at least, I
> haven't thought about the problem long enough to figure out how to
> generate this class).

This is an amazing co-oincidence, I think.  I just happened to be working on 
an XPCOM (Mozilla's COM variation) to CORBA bridge, primarily as a way to 
bootstrap Mozilla as a console for 4Suite Server.  I was using some Python for 
manipulating the IDLs and all that, but not as a wrapper because XPCOM right 
now only seems to connect to Javascript or C++ (please someone correct me if 
I'm wrong).

Anyway, even more important than that I ran into this Mozilla bug.

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62196

Which makes it quite difficult to test what I've worked on so far, or to get 
any further.  Or maybe I'm missing something: I've done a lot of work with 
CORBA but I'm a COM newbie and also a newbie to the Mozilla code-base.

If anyone is interested in my work, i.e. if you're interested in developing a 
console for your CORBA servers using basic Mozilla JavaScript, please help me 
out by voting for this bug on Mozilla.org.  The XPCOM/CORBA bridge will be 
open source (Apache license) when I get it working.

I'll have a look at Eliot's code for possible sharing of ideas, even though 
he's tackling a somewhat different area with Windows COM (you lucky dog, you 
get Python/COM out of the box).

Thanks all.


-- 
Uche Ogbuji                               Principal Consultant
uche.ogbuji@fourthought.com               +1 303 583 9900 x 101
Fourthought, Inc.                         http://Fourthought.com 
4735 East Walnut St, Ste. C, Boulder, CO 80301-2537, USA
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