[omniORB] CORBA benefits over EJB model

[W. Eliot Kimber]

Zed Shaw wrote:

> 2)  (I'm going to get in trouble for this one :-).  C++ requires "Guru"
> status just to code simple CORBA servers.  EJB requires "coding moron" status
> even for advanced stuff.

The use of CORBA does not require C++. We have written a sophisticated
CORBA-distributed app entirely in Python. The only C code we've written
for this project is patches to our 3rd-party dependencies (and small
ones at that). I am anything but a CORBA guru and I can go from abstract
object design to running servants and clients in a matter of an hour or
two (e.g., tasks where I am writing classes that expose existing
functionality in our underlying domain objects, so that most of the work
is defining the IDL and writing the servants, not implementing business
logic). We have no C++ gurus on our team.

One of the problems I've run into in talking to people about using CORBA
is the misconception that CORBA == C++, which it most certainly does
not.

We've found that, especially using the Python CORBA framework stuff we
developed (and have posted on the OmniORB site), that developing CORBA
apps in Python is about as easy as it could be.

While Python is not necessarily appropriate for all distributed
applications, we have found it has allowed us to develop the first
iteration of a working distributed system very quickly. Now we can
iteratively re-implement components in C++ or Java as we need to to get
the performance and security characteristics we need. But we have found
that for relatively small scales (1-200 concurrent users) that our
Python-based system is entirely acceptable (and we haven't yet squeezed
out all the performance we can out of our Python code nor do we
currently have the testing resources to determine the upper limit of our
current scalability). Our system now has client components implemented
in Python, VB (using Python as the COM-to-CORBA bridge), and Java using
several different ORBs. DataChannel is primarily a Java shop, so we
haven't had a requirement to do any direct C++ development of clients or
servers.

Cheers,

Eliot
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