[omniORB] Advice needed.. (I'm a newbie)

[Thomas Lockhart]

> Greetings.. I'm a student from the Philippines. I'm new to corba and omniorb. 
> I'll be starting an undergrad project in the next few months.  My project is
> LAN-Based teleoperation of a mobile robot.  I plan to have an wireless lan
> omniorb communication between the robot and a server. I also plan to have a
> Jacorb applet communicating with an omniorb server.  The camera-equipped robot
> will be sending   still images, and some data to the applet through the server.
> The applet should receive the images at a rate that would look like real time
> video feed.  Also, other data would be passed between applet and the robot.  My
> server would be an intel celeron 1.5ghz running Mandrake 10.1.  The robot runs
> with a 500mhz pentium running Redhat 7.2.  All of the communication will only
> take place on a LAN.  The robot will be communicating with the server via
> wireless LAN.
> 
> My questions are :
> 1.  I'm starting by April. I have 5 months to do the project.  Can I understand
> and program the CORBA apps in such time?  Are the CORBA apps that hard or easy
> to engineer?

CORBA should make this easier for you, but you must not spend much time 
trying to dig deep into CORBA issues. You don't have time for it if you 
want to accomplish everything else on your list. btw, it isn't CORBA per 
se to avoid spending time, but rather the issues of threading and 
communication however you would implement them. CORBA should deal with 
these for you.

> 2.  Will I have to deal with threads to achieve fast communication? (I hope I
> don't)

You will be limited by the IP stack and by your LAN. Your video feed 
will take the most bandwidth; with black and white images at 30Hz and 
320x240 you might have trouble pushing that 2MB/sec over the wireless 
LAN. Color will make it worse of course.

As you implement multiple interfaces, you will need to deal with 
threading issues, but only because you must decouple the timing of your 
robot server and your user interface server. Double buffering will be 
your friend here.

> 3.  Do I have to have 2 separate omniorb servers (robot-server and
> server-applet), or can I have a 2-in-1 server?

You can put all servers, implementing multiple interfaces, into the same 
application.

hth

                    - Tom