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Re: ANN: "Interacting with CORBA" article
In article <90ViOJ+RYOpMwEkHb+u6ijFKsgys@4ax.com>,
Jason Trenouth <jason@harlequin.com> wrote:
>Why have a separate scripting language standardization process?
You are looking for a technical rationale, when the primary reason for this
RFP was for policital, marketing, and administrative reasons. Please have a
look at OMG document orbos/97-05-25 (CORBA Component Imperatives); it gives
you some rationale:
# It is now time for OMA and CORBA to take the next step, by providing a
# component framework enabling CORBA objects, representing both client-side
# and non-visual server-side functionality, to be assembled into systems,
# using visual development tools and scripting languages, by unsophisticated
# programmers.
Apparently, the expected improvement was that client programming is simpler
in a scripting language than in C or C++ (or whatever other mappings where
available at that time). From my experience with Python, I think that this
is a realistic expectation.
>It is pointless continuing this thread as you don't understand our basic
>question even though we've asked it several times. Perhaps some other reader
>can enlighten us?
I can try :) In my view, the OMG IDLscript specification consists of two
parts: a language definition, and a mapping. As a mapping, it is "just
like any other mapping". As a language definition, it is "just like any
other language".
The key point that the submitters tried to make is simplicity. The mapping
is much simpler than that for other languages, as it is a one-to-one mapping
most of the time. It also has a number of convenience functions that make
interactive usage simpler (or possible in the first place).
Maybe your question is "why did OMG adopt that"? Again, the answer is
administrative. It was proposed to OMG membership, OMG membership took
some time to consider it (several years, actually), and in the end, they
found nothing wrong with it. So there is an implementation of the
specification, it is being used, it provides the features that had been
requested, and it does not conflict with the overall architecture: that
is sufficient to make something an OMG technology (in many cases).
Please keep in mind two things: First, OMG membership contains of many
different companies, which have different motivations for deciding the
way they did. You'd have to ask each single company to find out why they
voted for (or didn't vote for) IDLscript. Second, OMG adopts technologies
as standards, they do not sell products. For every technology, the "market"
will still decide whether the technology is useful. There have been
examples where the technology was extremely useful, and there have been
examples where the technology was retired because there was not even an
implementation anymore.
Regards,
Martin
References: