[Pipet Devel] Front to middle communication

[Gary Van Domselaar]

Brad Chapman wrote:
> 
> Jeff wrote:
> > I was just thinking that if we're using CORBA at all anywhere, why
> not use it
> > everywhere?
> 
> Wow! Did you really write this? CORBA everywhere, yay! :-)
> 
>     I think if we want to consider CORBA communication between the
> front GUI and the middle the most important thing is to consider how
> easy it will be for other people to implement front ends. Will CORBA
> be more difficult than sockets?

I'm inclined to think that CORBA would be a barrier for other people who
might want to implement their own front end.  If the front-end need only
an XML stream from the loci middel ('If' being the operative word here),
then I'm not sure what we would stand to gain from a GUI-Loci-middle
CORBA communication layer.

>     We can define a small CORBA interface that will mirror what we
> have now with sockets, and this could provide us some additional
> flexibility in terms of passing data (and might help deal with the
> problem I mentioned earlier about how to pass large amount of data
> from databases or files to the front).
>     I don't really want to make this change right yet unless we have a
> big problem we can't overcome with since sockets are working and we'll
> have millions of other changes to make to fit in with the 'vsh'
> project collaboration.
>     What do you all think?

I say stay the course, unless someone can put forward a good argument to
use CORBA.

g.
-- 
                                  Gary Van Domselaar
                               gary at bioinformatics.org
                          http://www.bioinformatics.org/~gary
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