I'm rearranging this conversation a little:
At 10:05 PM 7/4/99 +0100, Nic Ferrier wrote:
>>>> "Aaron M. Renn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 7/4/99 8:49:59 PM >>>
>>Actually, I believe the OMG group supplies the
>>Java standard for CORBA and maybe even the code as well. I wonder
>>if there is any chance of getting this released under a free
>>license.
AFAIK the interfaces published by OMG are (C) OMG, but otherwise public
domain. They (OMG) are the arbiter of what is officially in the Java IDL
mapping. Since much of the CORBA package consists of interfaces, it would
be fairly trivial to include those in Classpath, unless there's some
licensing gotcha I'm not aware of, as those interfaces can be
cut-and-pasted.
The hard part is writing the ORB machinery itself, and there are at least a
couple of ways to go about this:
>>The CORBA classes in Java are pretty extensive and would probably
>>be very difficult to implement. One thing I suggest is looking
>>for existing packages that might make a good starting point (such
>>as a free Java ORB).
(1) I had brought up JacORB, which is an academic project under LGPL that
has seen fairly extensive use. However, it's a long way from compatibility
with the ORB that JavaSoft ships with Java 2. On the other hand, it's a
pure-Java implementation. I wrote the author (it's a been a while) and he
was open to us picking it up as a starting point.
>There is a GNU ORB.
>
>See http://www.uk.research.att.com/omniORB/
(2) Since omniORB probably has some significant developer mindshare, this
might be a way to go. The interfaces would be the same, but the
implementation would mostly consist of native methods calling omniORB
(which has C++ bindings, but no Java binding -- basically that's what we'd
be implementing). And to run your code, you'd need omniORB libraries. If
we go this route, we could probably get some help as Java support for
omniORB is a feature they would probably like as well.
The question to me is whether Classpath is the Java runtime for a GNU
system, or a GNU Java runtime. I.e. the former lends itself to omniORB, the
latter to a pure-Java implementation.
Wes
