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.NET or CORBA?
DavidTurner queries: "My company is developing software to integrate various hardware systems and present a unified interface, plus system-level interaction. Essentially, an object hierarchy plus supporting services - clients, servers and drivers. We wish to replace our proprietary protocol with a standardized distributed object system. The choice has boiled down to .NET versus CORBA+GTK. We want interface contracts, OpenGL support, and embeddable forms (widgets). We also want rapid development. Which would you choose? Has anyone actually field-tested the relative merits of the two paths?"
Have you considered python? I'm learning it now, but I've read some great articles about how companies rapidly develop amazing systems with Python. Yahoo! Mail I believe was originally Python, and then ported to C++. It just might fit the bill.
Absolutely - it even has its own official CORBA mapping just like Java or C++. There are a number of free ORBs available like Fnorb and omniORBpy.
i'm was a .NET 'Everett' beta tester (IMO it sucks). Might be ready for real-world in a couple of years.
.NET kits exposed my computer to the slammer worm. Even though I have never installed MS SQL server!
When I went through my single-serving hotmail account yesterday (weekly spam trawl) I found an email from MS warning me beta
* anyways should be talking abour this NDA and EULA etc. *
Yes, it is a part of OpenStep. I wouldn't say that this erases hardware concerns though- asking them to migrate to OpenStep would be far more silly (and quite possibly far more expensive) than the switch to Mac OS X, even with new Mac hardware. However, you may have meant to suggest a switch to Linux with GNUstep. And yup, GNUstep supports the same DO API, and it's working now.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
CORBA has a lot of services too. There's a security service, nameservice and lots of others. Persistent object storage and transactions are among them, too.
.Net: You got only one vendor with both, so their products are allways complete. The implementation is the definition of the standard after all:-)
The downside is that not all ORBs do offer all services. That's better with J2EE and
Regards, Tobias
Colin Fahey has authored a C# OpenGL Wrapper if that helps any...
Schnapple
CORBA is an older distributed computing model that will probably be replaced by or enhanced with XML-based messaging solutions in the future. It is more difficult to develop with compared to web services. However, a .NET implementation will be even easier to implement than Java. Remoting (remote object proxying) is extremely simple and all the tools you really need are free. If your developers need coddling then use VS.NET w/Sourcesafe but IMHO it's just a fancy text editor :). Use SciTE, NAnt, NUnit, NDoc, CVS, and the free .NET tools.
The basic questions you must ask yourself:
- How will this system be integrated in the future? XML-based protocols can be integrated into a heterogenous environment... CORBA can too, but its nastier to implement.
- How important is cross-platform support:
- Must have, right now (in which case .NET is probably not an option).
- Strategic (in which case Mono might provide a partial or complete solution in the future).
If you use .NET, separate your UI classes from your business logic in separate libs. That way, if Mono doesn't support something in Windows Forms, you can still use the C# and hook it up to GTK+ with C bindings!
Also, there's a C# wrapper for the SDL (do a google search for it). That might provide the 3-D support you need. SDL is *very* cross-platform.
If you ever need any help, make me an offer! :)
ralvek