[Biocorba-l] BSANE and bioCORBA

[Philip Lijnzaad]

On Thu, 31 May 2001 12:59:03 +0100 (BST), 
"Ewan" == Ewan Birney <birney@ebi.ac.uk> wrote:

Ewan>    I need to revisit CosPropertyService and CosLifeCycle - if I remember
Ewan> right they make life a pain in the arse for implementors - 

CosProperty should be OK; CosLifeCycle is evil. It was just added because it
provides a remove() The others, move() and copy(), are completely
unimplementable, even the OMG agrees on that (in BSA, it's intended that
copy() and move() raise the NO_IMPLEMENT exception). So I would say drop
LifeCycle, and cut-n-paste remove()

Note: the semantics of remove() are that it destroys the CORBA object; after
this, noone who happens to have a reference to that same object, can do
anything with it anymore. 

Ewan> I prefer the GNOME reference counting system and just a short a simple
Ewan> key - list-value system as in BioCorba. 

I think I agree, but I also think Bonobo confuses the CORBA Object management
with the implementation object management, whereas they are (or can be)
largely orthogonal. Firstly, it relies on clients always calling ref() when
wanting to pass their object reference around; secondly, clients allways have
to call deref() when done with an object. Neither can be guaranteed,
especially with crashing clients and backhoes roaming the surface of the
earth.

The only scalable way to keep the resources under control is to periodically
restart the server (requires persistent iors), or to use an evictor queue, and
killing things that are drop off the queue and/or are too old. 

But this is probably nothing new. Cheers,

                                                                      Philip
-- 
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some. (Kraulis)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Philip Lijnzaad, lijnzaad@ebi.ac.uk \ European Bioinformatics Institute,rm A2-08
+44 (0)1223 49 4639                 / Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton
+44 (0)1223 49 4468 (fax)           \ Cambridgeshire CB10 1SD,  GREAT BRITAIN
PGP fingerprint: E1 03 BF 80 94 61 B6 FC  50 3D 1F 64 40 75 FB 53