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[Steve Vinoski]

This is getting off topic, but since it's CORBA I have to chime in. :-)

Doug Lea, Mark Linton, and I wrote the CORBA C++ mapping in the early
90s with hard-core C++ experts in mind. I can honestly say I've never
had any difficulty whatsoever with the C++ mapping. You might argue
that I have a big advantage since I helped write it, but I've gone
years without writing any CORBA code and have had zero trouble
recalling the C++ mapping rules again when necessary. There's a small
set of rules in the mapping that you need to learn; when you do so,
you find that it's all pretty consistent.

The Java mapping OTOH is a bit of a mess, because it's unlike any
normal Java coding or idioms. Java programmers have to resort to
different and somewhat unique approaches when they use that mapping.

What all those years of CORBA taught me, BTW, is that RPC, for a
number of reasons, is generally A Really Bad Idea. Call it a hard-won
lesson. The Erlang flavor of RPC is great because the entire Erlang
system has distribution fundamentally designed and built into it, but
for normal languages, RPC creates more problems than it solves.

--steve

On 5/21/08, Kevin A. Smith <kevin@REDACTED> wrote:
> How did you ever guess? :-) C++ and Java. And I still have the scars :(
>
> On May 21, 2008, at 5:37 PM, Dominic Williams wrote:
>
>  > Hi Kevin,
>  >
>  > Kevin A. Smith a écrit :
>  >> I like Thrift because there's no ORB, the client/server
>  >> model is actually pretty sane, and the IDL strikes the
>  >> right balance between completeness and usefulness. I can
>  >> actually read the source to Thrift and understand what
>  >> the code is doing. The last time I did anything with
>  >> CORBA (around the late 1990's) it was all so complicated
>  >> and difficult to use. It seemed like "Hello, World"
>  >> required a ton of infrastructure and 100 lines of code.
>  >> IMHO SOAP is just as bad with all the WS-* madness and
>  >> lack of interop between impls.
>  >
>  > Back in the late nineties, were you using CORBA from C or C++?
>  >
>  > I have not looked at Thrift, but using CORBA from Python and
>  > Erlang is a breeze. Even the Java binding is quite nice,
>  > certainly a lot simpler than C++.
>  >
>  > Regards,
>  >
>  > Dominic Williams
>  > http://dominicwilliams.net
>  >
>  > ----
>
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