[Mono-list] corba questions

[Tyson Dowd]

On 19-Jul-2001, Dick Porter <dick@ximian.com> wrote:
> On 19 Jul 2001 18:16:52 +0200, Tyson Dowd wrote:
> > On 19-Jul-2001, Sebastien Lambla <sebastien.lambla@6sens.com> wrote:
> > > Andrew,
> > > 
> > > I think the CORBA support in mono has two aspects:
> > > 
> > > 1. Accessing CORBA objects, that would need being able to generate CORBA
> > > wrappers, which is quite similar to COM wrappers, using reflection to
> > > construct a .net wrapper of the object from the IDL, and make the interop
> > > transparent to the .net program. Writing it in pure C# would be a great
> > > addition to mono and to the dotnet platform in general.
> > 
> > I've only thought about this very quickly, but here are my thoughts:
> > 
> > The IDL doesn't have to play a part in this.  It would be better to take
> > an existing CORBA object, and query it dynamically (using DII) to find
> > out what its types are, then generate the appropriate .NET interface
> > which is a small stub into the CORBA object.
> 
> You need an interface repository for this, which needs to be populated
> with the info (typically from the IDL :-) )

Well, it comes from the IDL if it is an existing (dare I say
"legacy"!!!) CORBA object, but otherwise it can be populated by whatever
-- perhaps a another .NET object that has been rendered as a CORBA object
via DSI.

This also allows you to interface to non-IDL based Corba interfaces (for
example, I think the elisp CORBA interfaces is completely dynamic).

The IDL based approach might be useful in the short term, but I think it
has quite a few limitations.

Tyson.