[Biocorba-l] ORB compatibility

[Brad Chapman]

Antoine:
> As Ewan pointed out, it is time to take a long hard and painful look at
> the various free ORB's and make sure that they can handle what we want
> to throw at them.

Good ideas all around. Thanks for starting this.

> My own knowledge is predominantly related to C++ and Python but maybe we
> can fill in the gaps between us ?

I only know about python, but I can add my 2 cents/experience on
things below.

> (Y=no problems, N=no support, B=buggy, ?=who knows)
> 
>                       | any | out param | obj by val | 
> ----------------------+-----+-----------+------------+
> orbit-python (0.2.0)  |  Y  |     Y     |     ?      |

I've had lots of struggles with ORBit-python thus far, and haven't
been able to get many things working with the current biocorba IDL
(using the same code which works fine with omniORBpy). Development is
going on though -- so hopefully we'll have a new version to test
with and will have more luck.

> ilu                   |  dead as a dodo AND it leaks |

<sigh> It's so sad -- ILU was such a nice ORB implementation.

> omniORB      (3.0.2)  |  Y  |     Y     |     Y      |
> omniORBpy    (1.2)    |  Y  |     Y     |     ?      |

Last I remember, valuetypes weren't even supposed to get into the next 
major release of omniORB(py), so I don't think valuetype support'll be 
around for a while.

An addition:

fnorb (a python ORB)    |  Y  |     Y     |     N      |

Fnorb is a nice ORB for new users because it is almost all python, and 
thus really easy to install and get going. Development is dead on this 
as well right now, but I keep hoping they'll open-source it sometime
and things will pick up.

Brad