Slashdot Mirror
.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
No, really. If you don't even know if either .NET or CORBA+GTK supports OpenGL, widgets, and interface contracts, you don't know enough about either architecture to make any kind of informed decision, regardless of what the /. crowd says.
.NET for non-Windows platforms.
.NET is even an option, you're probably working at a fairly dedicated Windows shop, so that's a moot point. . .
Personally, I'd be inclined to use CORBA+GTK for the simple reason that I don't like to be tied to any one platform, and last I heard Mono is not quite mature enough to make it a viable implementation of
But if
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
But to be quite honest, it is dufficult to give a proper recommendation without specifics.
Here are my recommendations.
Look into Java for you system, mainly since you are stating you need cross-platform compliance.
You could use Java's RMI for this Jav architecture, which is the second fastest distrubited call framework available, and second only to sockets...SOAP, DCOM, and CORBA are respectably slower, CORBA being the slowest of the bunch.
If you want to go the C/C++ route, use SOAP, which will allow you to be extensible and allow you to be crossplatform and ready for whatever your pointy haired boss wants to throw your way next week.
I do NOT fully understand your necessity for OpenGL, nor do I understand the GTK requirement so my suggestions may be invalid.
If you are looking for a cross-platform distributed application framework, again, look at SOAP and/or Java both are proven technologies.
I FIRMLY believe SOAP has pretty much made CORBA obsolete.
Flame on for my ignorance....
Second, RMI runs over JRMP (a Java native protocol) or IIOP (CORBA's protocol). JRMP is slightly faster than IIOP, but both are comparable. In a multi-langauge environment IIOP would allow you to use CORBA to integrate your Java apps with apps written in other languages.
This is not to say that SOAP is useless, or even bad. The broad base of support SOAP enjoys means it could become a lowest common denominator; a kind of the middleware for middle. But it by no means replaces CORBA. There are many good articles on this topic from both the pro-SOAP and the pro-CORBA sides. As another poster said, when making these sorts of decisions it is important to research both sides rather than trying to measure the oppinion of slashdot.
I firmly believe that SOAP and CORBA are complimentary technologies.
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.
CORBA is a architecture that allows objects -- implemented in different languages and running distributed over a network consisting of mashines of different architectures -- to communicate. I fail to see how GTK or OpenGL get into the picture here. ..Of course you can use OpenGL, GTK or any other library in your CORBA objects (if you implement them in a language matching the library you want to use), but that got absolutely nothing to do with CORBA per se. CORBA's location transparency makes using such libraries a bit harder of course: You need to make sure all relevant objects are on the same mashine for one thing. Then you might end up with a multithreaded application because of the CORBA ORB you have choosen which might confuse some of the libraries you want to use.
.Net, having not used it yet. But in general I'd prefer to base my work on a architecture that has had some years to settle. And .Net is so far rather restricted to one plattform. Mono might change that in time, but with its head developer announcing that they'll just drop whichever part might get them into legal trouble I wouldn't want to base my company's products on that plattform. You might wake up one morning and find out that that mono suddenly no longer supports networking or something;-)
Having said this it is hard to give any advice based on the little information you provide. CORBA is a very powerful architecture, deffinitly more powerful then SOAP (No object-by-refernce or activation for example) and others. As allmost allways this power comes at the price of complexity. You'll need to sit down, figure out your requirements for the communications architecture you need and then go over the list of available alternatives.
I can't really say much about
Regards, Tobias
Regards, Tobias
Colin Fahey has authored a C# OpenGL Wrapper if that helps any...
Schnapple