[Zope-dev] ODMG compliance?

[Tres Seaver]

Michel Pelletier <michel@digicool.com> wrote:
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Kenneth Y.K. YOUNG [mailto:kyoung@kyoung.net]
> > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 9:12 PM
> > To: Zope-Dev Mailing List
> > Cc: Hannu Krosing; Anthony Baxter
> > Subject: RE: [Zope-dev] ODMG compliance?
> >
> >
> >
> > My understanding of ODMG standard is superficial, but the
> > motivation of
> > examining Zope's standard compliance are as follows: (pls
> > correct me if I'm
> > wrong)
> >
> > (1) how well it integrates with Corba - i.e. can I access
> > Zope functions
> > from programs written in perl/C/smalltalk/Java via corba, and
> > have zope
> > reuse Corba components written in these languages.
> 
> Corba integration does not exist, but it would not be dificult to do.
> As a corba client, you could take some third party python corba package
> and integrate it into a Zope product to create "CORBA Methods" that
> would word presumably like External Methods.

I am working on a Zope product which will use Fnorb (a 99.44% pure Python CORBA
2.2 ORB) to browse the names and objects published in any compliant COSNaming
server.  Fnorb maps "normal" Python method calls onto CORBA method calls, so
once you have the reference (and know the interface), making such calls should
be straightforward.

> 
> As a CORBA server you could create a new ZServer module.  Remember,
> ZPublisher, the 'heart' of Zope, is an Object Request Broker (ORB) that
> maps quite cleanly onto CORBA.  In the past when ZPublisher was Bobo, I
> beleive there was even some work done to make Bobo corba aware, I'm not
> certain.
> 
> In any case there has been no demand on us for it for a while now, corba
> is not a very active standard.  XML-RPC seems to fill it's shoes quite
> well.

A CORBA server interface (probably using DSI) would be just another access path,
like WebDAV or FTP;  it would almost certainly have to live inside Medusa to
avoid creating synchronization problems with the other protocols.  The key
problem (as with XML-RPC) is making the interface definitions available to the
client -- marshalling the parameters is transparent.  Zope's URL-traversal
namespace is conceptually quite close to the graph used in COSNaming -- a CORBA
client would, however, expect to "know" that some names were "objects", while
others were "methods".

<OQL discussion snipped due to my ignorance>
> 
> I couldn't tell you, but you could take a hack at it.  I belive there
> are a couple Python corba packages.

Fnorb:
http://www.dstc.edu.au/Fnorb              
Uses C for parsing IDL and  marshalling CDR; all else Python.

ILU:
ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html
C core, Python bindings, along with Lisp, Perl, C++


-- 
=========================================================
Tres Seaver         tseaver@palladion.com    713-523-6582
Palladion Software  http://www.palladion.com