Musings on an Erlang GUI System.

[Luke Gorrie]

Joe Armstrong <joe@REDACTED> writes:

>   I saw freso a while ago - IMHO fresco has the right architecture but the
> *wrong* transport medium - CORBA for the transport of data between the
> client and server will give a large performance hit and adds an incredable
> amount of unecessary complexity - If the'd just have erlang terms or lisp
> S-expressions or UBF to communicate it would be great.

Actually I don't see why CORBA need be a performance hit: the Internet
Inter-Orb Protocol (IIOP) it uses is just a pretty-efficient binary
protocol over TCP sockets. It *should* even be a little more efficient
than e.g. Erlang, since IIRC the type information is agreed at both
ends and doesn't have to be included in the messages.

I think the real CORBA performance trap is to end up doing too many
RPCs, by choosing protocols based on traditional local-objects
programming style instead of more coarse grained IETF-style network
protocols. There is a nice paper about this phenomenon called "A Note
on Distributed Computing":
http://research.sun.com/techrep/1994/abstract-29.html

The CORBA complexity hit is probably the real problem!

Cheers,
Luke