Now, to respond to Steve's comments I just wanted to mention that I'm
currently involved in a graduate seminar in distributed clien-server
computing and one of the things that has come out of our studies so far
(it's early in the semester) is that none of the available standards
is really complete or robust unto itself. The new CORBA2 spec is going
to be a large improvement on the original and fixes a lot of the problems
that the original CORBA spec created, but overall it will be a learning
process just as the transition to an object model in general has been
in the software engineering industry.
As part of this course I have taken on the responsibility for writing
a dynamic language interface for a CORBA-comliant ORB called ORBeline.
The interface will be for Perl so that perl scalars , arrays, and possibly
even "blessed" objects will be translated into CORBA::object formats and
back out. The net result will be that you can use Perl scripts to perform
queries of CORBA-compliant brokers through a fairly standardized interface.
The actual implementation that will come out of the project will be specific
for ORBeline, but I don't anticipate a whole lot of major changes necessary
for another ORB and would be willing to make a port to really popular ORB
types if persuaded ($$) or cajoled by the net community in general (free).
I'm still in the process of exploring what exactly the ORB can capably do,
but as far as I know at this point, one potential bonus will be accessing
DBMS's in all shapes and flavors that have a CORBA-compliant interface.
If anyone is interested in seeing particular functionality come out of the
project please mail me directly and we can discuss how your needs might be
accomplished.
Thanks for reading!
Adam T. McClure
mcclurea@colorado.edu
Integrated Teaching & Learning Laboratory