An Ode To My Two Loves

[Mike Meyer]

Peter Maas <peter at somewhere.com> writes:

> Jorgen Grahn schrieb:
>> It's something that worries me frequently -- I feel guilty when I introduce
>> Python into ("force Python upon") an organization. Because I hate having
>> /other/ people's favorite toy languages forced down /my/ throat ...
>
> The solution is a multi language glue layer. Software interfaces are
> defined in a  language independent way so that they can be used by
> many  languages.I wonder why COM is so dominant on Windows and most
> Unixish systems don't use CORBA (with GNOME as an exception).
> Microsoft's .net takes this one step further by defining a multi
> language implementation layer.

COM is dominant on Windows because MS pushes it. CORBA isn't dominant
on Unix because there are a slew of extensible/embeddable languages to
pick from instead - assuming the apps in question came up with a
solution better than rolling their own. See <URL:
http://www.mired.org:8080/home/mwm/scripting/ > for my thoughts on the
matter before I learned better.

> I hope these ideas will become more influential in Unix like systems
> as well just to stop this resource wasting source code issue.

XMLRPC seems to be displacing CORBA for interobject
communications. It's not clear it's becoming an intercommunications
tool for scripting applications.

In any case, Plan 9 has a much better solution than COM, CORBA or
XMLRPC. I can script plan 9 applications with the shell. I can't do
that with CORBA (well, my quick search failed to turn up CORBA
bindings for sh. It can probably be done with XMLRPC, but it would be
ugly. The problem is that this requires fundamental changes in the
underlying OS (by adding per-process mount points), but there's
mention of experiments with that for Linux.

        <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.