Subject: Re: corba or sockets?
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: 01 Nov 2000 13:47:01 +0000
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3182075221642184@naggum.net>

* Erik Naggum
| ... you might decide not to "know" where your objects are.  This
| could lead to all _kinds_ of interesting performance pessimizations,
| just one of which is CORBA.

  I thought this was an obvious tongue-in-cheek comment.

* Philip Lijnzaad <lijnzaad@ebi.ac.uk>
| Are you suggesting that there is a performance bottleneck in that
| you have to know where (host,port or so) they are in order to use
| CORBA objects?

  No, I am "suggesting" that if you make a decision not to know the
  location of your objects, you open up for a number of ways to waste
  time and resources, relative to knowing where they are, obviously.
  You are most probably not arguing that there is _no_ performance
  cost in using COBRA compared to a direct in-memory object reference,
  so I am a little uncertain what you are actually thinking of and
  responding to.

| Some of the critcism that I see raised against CORBA derive from the
| fact that people don't appreciate the kinds of things that CORBA
| solves.

  That could also be true, but in my case, I do not care for the kinds
  of things COBRA does to accomplish what it does solve.  I don't have
  anything against what CORBA tries to solve, which is all very smart
  and very good and all that.

| When you look closely at it, no other technology (cgi, RMI, SOAP,
| DCOM) comes close to offering its functionality.

  This looks like marketing to me, with fairly automatic responses,
  and I have to reopen my ears to continue to read what you're saying.

| Just to be explicit about this:
| 
|  - language independence
|  - platform/vendor independence
|  - location independence
|  - network protocol independence
|  - separation of 'distributed objects' from their implementations
|  - security model
|  - location forwarding
|  - on-demand launching of servers
|  - fault-tolerance capabilities
|  - async messaging
|  - footprint
|  - performance
| 
| and there's prolly a few things I overlooked.

  Thanks for the list of features.  Do you see a list of misfeatures
  or at least problems that would impel someone _not_ to use CORBA if
  they wanted some of these features?

#:Erik
-- 
  Does anyone remember where I parked Air Force One?
                                   -- George W. Bush