Iterators/vectors (was: [Biocorba-l] BSANE and bioCORBA)

[Martin Senger]

> 
>  - I like to know what I'm dealing with up front, not at run time, if I
>    can help it.
>
   But you know - because you got an iterator from a known object. The
problem can occur only if the server implementation really sucks. 

>  - Using any's suddenly exposes the fact you're using CORBA with its
>    associated helper classes. (I like my CORBA to be invisible).
>
   It depends. If your implementation deals directly with methods from an
IDL you must see CORBA anyway, w or w/o anys. But you can make your
implementation modular - and let only one module deal with the CORBA world
(together with anys) - and the rest is completely CORBA-unaware. This
approach may need, time to time, to create an additional object, or call
few more methods, that's true, but I believe that such overhead is small
comparing with the beauty of modularity. You know my examples from
implementation of BQS (bibliographic query service, for those
non-initiated yet) and Candy (controlled vocabularies) where you can
decide just by command-line arguments whether you want to use corba or a
local classes. These examples are from Java but I believe that soon I will
be able to show the same approach in perl in the "novella" project (a perl
access to the BSA analysis engine).

   Martin

-- 
Martin Senger

EMBL Outstation - Hinxton                Senger@EBI.ac.uk     
European Bioinformatics Institute        Phone: (+44) 1223 494636      
Wellcome Trust Genome Campus             (Switchboard:     494444)
Hinxton                                  Fax  : (+44) 1223 494468
Cambridge CB10 1SD
United Kingdom                           http://industry.ebi.ac.uk/~senger