Networked Component Interface For Free Unicies?

Graymalkin asks: "I'm in the process of learning COM for use with evil Windows apps and got to wondering what sort of competition for COM there is in the land of Open Source. I know about CORBA and its integration with both KDE and GNOME, but I want to know how far it extends? What's in the pipeline? Microsoft's .NET architecture ties together half a dozen technologies to make a pretty cool programming model. Is there anything comparable in Open Source land, not merely a object communication scheme (CORBA, COM) but a whole architecture based on distributed computing?"

Java?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't suppose that Java might come to mind? In my experience, it's been quite ideal for distributed computing, particularly because it can tie in with CORBA and, if you're lucky, COM (through J++ - yuck).

Seriously, though, in a distributed environment, having support for a heterogeneous cluster of machine is probably ideal, and Java's built-in networking facilities (and threading) make complex tasks quite easy.

Extend that a bit further and you can think about Java's Exception handling. Development time can easily be reduced by making proper use of this to be able to get easy stack traces and descriptive bug reports on the fly.

While sometimes the Java Virtual Machine might have bugs in it which cause issues, in my experience the Virtual Machine has saved my app from crashing far more than it's ever let me down.

I suggest you take a look. Personally, I'm currently in the design phase (I'm leading the development efforts) of a rewrite of a major application for my company, moving from a COM-based system to Java. Already the benefits have become quite clear, and a true inheritance-supporting OO development environment can really make life easier for you! Not just that, but developers can choose their development environment. Coupled with a source-control system (CVS/RCS?), it needn't matter if your team developed on completely different OSs and with different tools.

I've done my research for our app, and for us it seemed to be the best available solution. Good luck, and happy hunting!

Re:Java?

[woggo]

There are also COM-to-Java bridges, both payware (JIntegra, which I've used), and free-beer (bridge2java, available from IBM Alphaworks [ibm.com]. bridge2java requires JNI; I haven't used it, but I have friends and colleagues who swear by it.


~wog

Bonobo

[AstroJetson]

Bonobo is a component model for GNOME, loosely modeled after Microsoft's COM. It uses CORBA as the transport mechanism, which of course makes it far more portable than COM. For more info, check these links:
a guide to GNOME and CORBA [aol.com]
an intro to Bonobo [ibm.com]