Re: On intended use cases of the distributed annex

[Maciej Sobczak <see.my.homepage@gmail.com>]

W dniu czwartek, 25 września 2014 17:02:07 UTC+2 użytkownik Brad Moore napisał:

> Not quite true that all the nodes need to be written in Ada.  I have 
> used DSA to send C++ objects to C++ applications (or at least objects of 
> C++ classes that are derived from Ada types), and as well had C++ 
> applications remotely interacting with each other C++ and other Ada 
> applications using the DSA.

This sounds interesting. Can you give a bit more details on this? Was it related to the DSA implementation that actually used CORBA under the hood? Was it necessary to extract some interface definition files from Ada specs?
Or did you just reverse-engineered the DSA wire protocol that was in use?
Was your solution immune to compiler upgrades?
And so on - lot's of questions. :-)

> I also appreciate that the DSA is more closely integrated with the 
> compiler, allowing the compiler to check and catch problems that a 
> library only approach does not provide.

Was it also closely integrated with the C++ nodes? ;-)

The "close integration with the compiler" makes most sense when there is a single build process for all the nodes. Otherwise there is no guarantee that individual nodes are compiled with the same specs and the whole notion of static type safety goes down the drain. This is particularly relevant in bigger systems where distinct nodes are developed by different teams and/or are deployed at different time schedules. More on this here:

http://www.inspirel.com/articles/What_Is_Wrong_With_IDL.html

Still, I'm very much interested in your Ada/C++ integration over DSA.

-- 
Maciej Sobczak * http://www.msobczak.com * http://www.inspirel.com