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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?"
DISCLAIMER: You may not be interested in this combo because of a prejudice or (more likely) an existing hardware investment.
:)
Mac OS X + Cocoa may be an option worth exploring. Users of the Objective-C language and the Cocoa libraries find it quite excellent. I'm primarily a Smalltalk programmer, used to the very supportive development environment and mature and full-featured library provided by it... Which generally makes me hard to impress. However, in a couple dives into OS X application development, I have to say that it is a very nice setup.
Part of the default Cocoa libraries is a pretty mature Distributed Object framework.
Then again, for something as simple as distributed objects and a UI, I have everything that I need to do that already in Squeak. I can use protocols like XML-RPC or SOAP in this setting, or a faster protocol that is more specific to Smalltalk.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
We had to choose between .NET and J2EE. We ended up with .NET. The decision was purely financial. When we put down on paper how much it would cost in software purchase in order for us to equip our team and deploy our solution, it turned out that we already had everything we needed for .NET
.NET, I believe .NET is a more elegant solution. That is just my opinion. .NET is still new. However, anyone who understands the concept of an enterprise app should pick up .NET easy. I believe CORBA is much harder to pick up for a programmer being introduced into a development team.
Java enterprise development did not look cheap at all.
Of course, you may be starting from a different point. We already had VS.NET licenses, fully licenses MS servers, etc.
As for Corba vs.
Corba programmers are hard to come by, and
Python got CORBA bindings and those are great! CORBA with C sucks, CORBA with C++ is nice, CORBA with Python rocks.
Regards, Tobias
Regards, Tobias
.NET is not fully viable yet. Sure it's out but it's not what I would call mature yet. However Java, J2EE App Servers like Weblogic or JBOSS, and SOAP are much further along. Also the whole Java thing is rather cross platform as well. .NET is Windows only. Even if you only have Windows boxes you need to think about how to scale your system over time. What happens if you rollout .NET and set all your standards and it ends up costing you a fortune to scale it up? Or worse you hit a roadblock and need to completely change your architecture from scratch?
.NET.
If you've got serious requirements then consider highend Sun hardware with Weblogic Java J2EE App Servers. Sun hardware is expensive but it really does scale very very well and the systems will last for many years. We still run production Sun boxes that are ancient. If you can't afford that and it's overkill, consider Low cost Linux blades or boxes and run Tomcat/JBOSS instead. Once you optimize a Linux build by stripping out everything you don't need and tune it, it's very efficient (same with Sun, ours are stripped down to the bare minimum at the OS level). Just slam as much RAM as you can into the hardware. Java needs elbow room to work but once it's got the RAM it works very very well. Of course you'll need good programmers who know what they are doing. One can screw up Java just as easy as
To truly make a good recommendation, one would need a whole lot more information than what you provided. Perhaps Slashdot needs a RFP (Request for Proposal) option! Really, most of these questions are lacking in the proper information to provide proper advise. In this case we have no information about what the users current environment is and where they think it's going. Lot's of options and possibilities.
Not so sure I would trust Microsoft for my Enterprise infrastructure. I always laugh my ass off when I see an MS Enterprise commerical. I almost choked to death when I saw the first MS Enterprise ads. Taking into account all of the recent security problems MS has had, I cannot trust them at all. We scan incoming and outgoing email about 4 times both ways. We probe for unsecured IIS loads on workstations, we look for MS SQL loads as well now. MS Servers are constantly being rebooted for no apparent reason other than "it works when we reboot it". They disappear on the network for no apparent reason. They lock up completely so we have to power them off. We have about 1,000 MS trained staff members to maintain the desktops and servers. We have 5 people managing the Unix Mission Critical systems. Of course those 5 people make a hell of a lot more money but they are worth it.
I would not place the foundation of my network in the hands of Microsoft. I have 10 year old Unix systems still in production that just plain work.
Hate to say it but .NET rocks. It has all the network and protocol support you need and makes interfacing with C/DLLs/COM really easy, and WinForms is a dream to work with (wish I could say the same about Java). I don't love MS, but .NET is a terrific collection of technologies (if only Sun knew what they were bringing upon themselves when they shunned delegates and the WFC).
Corba/GTK? Unless you really love working with and around outdated technologies, don't waste your time. Corba is dead, long live SOAP.