Python and CORBA

[Roland Mas]

Samuel A. Falvo II (2000-08-15 14:34:06 -0700) :

> In article <877l9jjhpv.fsf at cachemir.echo-net.net>, Roland Mas wrote:
> >> In the interests of not being absolutely shocked when things
> >> don't work as planned, PyORBit, or anything else based on ORBit,
> >> do not produce IORs capable of being read by any other ORB.  The
> >> reason is that they lack an IIOP profile in the IOR, which
> >> prevents an object from being located via an IIOP channel.
> >
> >I'll have to trust you on that point, since I'm absolutely not sure of
> >what you mean (in other words, I don't follow you).
> 
> An "object reference" in CORBA contains one or more things call "Profiles."
> These profiles tell the CORBA ORB where to *find* the object to which it
> refers.  For example, if someone were to make a CORBA ORB that used SOAP as
> its remote procedure call format, a web URL would be one of the profiles
> that sits inside the object reference.

Ah, I see.  I seem to recall a colleague of mine showing me something
like that, though...  He took an object reference (or IOR, not sure,
but anyway it's about the same, uh? :-), piped it through some black
magic, and voila, there I had two profiles, one about a Unix socket
and the other one containing an IP address and a TCP port.  If that
matters, e-mail me, I'll try and confirm when he gets back from
vacation.


[About ORBit not able to do any IIOP / TCP stuff]
> >  On that point I can speak: you are just plain wrong.  Maybe you
> 
> No, *I* am not wrong -- the folks who work on GNOME are wrong,
> apparently; see below.  ;)

  Well I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to shoot you <wink>.  Other
people being wrong do not prevent you so to be, (un)fortunately...

> >certain number of Unix sockets in /tmp/orbit-<login> if you do not
> >disable Unix sockets in /etc/orbitrc (that's where you activate IIOP,
> >too -- IP4 and IPv6, although I haven't tried IPv6 yet).  I guess
> 
> THANK YOU!  THANK YOU!  <8~-D I have talked to no less than about 10
> people about this, in both #gtk+ and in #gnome (nobody on the
> mailing lists at all responded to my questions), and *nobody* has
> ever told me that.  :)

  I guess they're more into graphics and widgets and stuff than into
CORBA.  CORBA is somewhat hidden to all but GNOME core developers, I
believe (not sure about that).

> If this works, I'll gladly and proudly stand corrected!  :) If it
> doesn't, do you mind if I private e-mail you for additional
> assistance?  (Note that I work primarily with C for ORBit, since
> Fnorb is already set up for my Python CORBA stuff.)

  Be my guest...

> >| Also some fairly crude benchmarks of ORBit-Python show that for
> >| local calls it is around 50 times faster than Fnorb, 6 times faster
> >| than Java, and only about 50% slower then native C code for ORBit.
> 
> Well, ORBit itself is honkin' fast too.  Don't forget that good algorithms
> is the single best way to "optimize" something significantly.

  Absolutely true (about the algorithms, since I know nothing about
ORBit vs. other ORBs).

> >  Just advocating a little bit, and reflecting the truth where it was
> >mistold :-)
> 
> I just wish someone had done this about six months ago, when I was trying to
> figure out why, exactly, none of my code was working via TCP/IP... :)

  Six months ago, I only knew the basic architecture of CORBA (the
bus / skeleton / stub stuff).  That's what I like about CORBA: it's
fairly straightforward to use even if you don't know the internals.
Yeah, OK, Python helped alot, too ;-)

  Anyway, I feel we're discussing CORBA more than Python here.  Let's
move over to the appropriate group, shall we?

Roland.
-- 
Roland Mas

Just a little bit of you every day will surely keep the doctors away.
  -- Just a little bit of you (The Jackson Five)