.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?"

Comments

Start with some research

[Bastian]

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.

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 .NET for non-Windows platforms.

But if .NET is even an option, you're probably working at a fairly dedicated Windows shop, so that's a moot point. . .

Re:Python is distributed?

[FredNerk]

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.

What's got OpenGL got to do with CORBA?

[t_hunger]

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.

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 .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;-)

Regards, Tobias