MS Windows calling Unix

[Andrew Dalke]

Hello,

  I'm interested in getting MS Windows apps talking to
a set of Unix based services.  To make it easier to
develop Windows apps, I want to provide the interfaces
via COM.

  I can think of several ways to implement the server.
First, there are some DCOM implemention for Unix.  One
mentioned here was GCOM <http://www.armored.net/gcom/>,
but "At the time this document was produced, neither
remote nor local servers have been implemented".  Another
is EntireX <http://www.softwareag.com/entirex/Default.htm>,
but I can find no non-vendor pages commenting about using
it, and the docs say the Linux demo needs Linux 2.036
and libc, while I'm running 2.2.x with a glibc.
  Then there's the question of getting it to work with
Python on the unix side.

  Another server implementation is via a COM to CORBA
gateway.  I prefer using CORBA than DCOM, btw.  When I
searched for products, I found references to bridged by
Iona, Visual Edge, Visibroker Bridge, and Orbix COMet.
But what little experience I have is with ILU and
pyOmniORB, and not with the commercial ORBS - which don't
seem to offer Python bindings.

  Then there are the build-it-myself solutions.  I've got
a copy of the Python for Windows book, and it isn't very
hard to build a COM server in Python.  I can convert the
calls to, say, an HTTP request to the server.  Most of
what I need for the beginning is stateless, so this should
be fine, but eventually I'll need a stateful solution.
Think of talking to Zope objects!

  (I could also have the VB apps use HTTP directly, but
then I would actually have to *do* VB programming :)

  Does anyone here have suggestions on the best approach
to take, esp. related to using COM servers?

                    Andrew Dalke
                    dalke at acm.org