[Pipet Devel] RE: msg 'the MICO/CORBA issue.'

Svanberg Liss lisss at ydab.se
Tue Oct 12 10:47:51 EDT 1999


> From what I gathered, KDE is concerned that CORBA is overkill (and too
slow) for
> user interface components and document embedding.  They say that CORBA is
best
> for distributing objects across a network but that nobody is really going
to
> want to run a GUI across a network.  So, KDE is planning on making a
'local
> library' to handle these things without CORBA.
<snip>

I think ORBit is quite fast.
I recall that Elliot has said that it's allmost as fast as a plain shared
library, when running it on a local machine...

I'm not sure if this is correct, but I know that ORBit is *very* fast,
compared to many other ORB's.
( including Micro$oft's DCOM, which isn't CORBA but often is compared to
CORBA )

> I _think_ Bonobo uses CORBA and is not quite what the KDE people had in
mind.
<snip>

Yes, bonobo uses CORBA. Bonobo allso has got a shared library. From what
I've understood, the shared library is just a way to make it easier to write
bonobo applications, and not to make them faster , because it is simply a
big wrapper around the CORBA stuff.

Gnome was using MICO in the beginning, but they stopped using it because
they thought it was too slow (just after I had got it running ;), and
created their own ORB with speed in mind.
KDE on the other side, are [still] using MICO, so I think this think about
"CORBA is to slow" is more of a KDE matter than a Gnome/Bonobo.

> As for Loci, I think what KDE says about the shortcomings of CORBA for GUI
> components is valid.  The approach we want to take is to get the GUI
information
> transferred quickly and _once_, via an XML description.  We wrote about
this at
> length in the past.  If the user needs a low-level component, Loci will
point to
<snip>

Ok, there is a good point here.
Anyone can put their own GUI togeather in runtime, whit a little scripting (
or perhaps a lot of scripting :)
No bandwidth is wasted just to make things run.

But the same approach is possible using CORBA, you are just not bound to run
everything locally.

// Liss




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