Going from webscripting to server-client software.

[Stephen]

> [...]
> >I know there's lots to learn here and would prefer to go read up
> >rather than trouble you so any helpful resources will see me on my way.
> >Should I be looking at SOAP/.Net or Visual Basic or Java/CORBA instead
> >or is Python up to it?  What other caveats are there ?
> 
> This is the ideal kind of application for CORBA. You could model both
> the booking server and each of your client applications as CORBA
> objects. They would then easily communicate with each other so
> everything is kept up-to-date.
> 
> Python is the easiest language in which to develop CORBA applications,
> and there are a number of CORBA implementations available. This page
> has a list of them:
> 
>   http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/4930

Thank you very much, Duncan.  After looking around for a couple of days (hence
my late followup. sorry), it does seem like my options are 
(a) CORBA
(b) SOAP
(c) XMLRPC
(d) Pyro

CORBA has always been intimidating. So much work just to do "hello world",
let along build a full app.  Then again, I suppose it's less work than
trying to manage communications between all the distributed clients which
is what I understand CORBA takes care of for me.  Interesting that you say
Python is the easiest language in which to develop CORBA apps because I 
thought that that was Java's EJB selling point, that it takes care of 
CORBA for you.

SOAP is interesting because of .Net
I was very excited by John Udell's article
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=804/byt20010712s0002/
where he mentions that in J2EE, the platform is the Java language but
.Net really does look language and maybe platform independent. Same 
advantages of CORBA of course.

XMLRPC seems to have been superceded by SOAP and certainly doesn't
seem any faster.  CORBA will be more appealing to me than SOAP or XMLRPC
from a speed and scalability point of view because I'd like to build my
booking application to be reused for other, larger companies and not just
my current client.

Pyro looks dead easy. Main problem being that if somebody else wants
to work with the system, to extend it etc, they have to use Python.
I try to provide clients with as many options as possible for future
development and not lock them into Python.  Also, it's safer to go with
a standard thing like CORBA,XMLRPC,SOAP.  However, well done to Irmen
for creating something so simple that works like CORBA.

 
> I won't recommend one. I wrote omniORBpy so I'm biased.

I've heard good things about that. Will check it out.  
Most importantly, lots of documentation and win 2000 binaries (I like
to reduce the number of things that can go wrong) :)

Thanks again.

S.