Re: Howto communicate between Java and Ada in OS/2

[bill.beckwith@ois.com]

Andrew Lynch wrote:
>
> Michael Erdmann wrote:
> >
> > im trying to setup a  demonstration where the interworking between a
Java
> > written front end
> > which will be executed using netscape 2.02 under OS/2 and an ada
written
> > backend has to
> > be demonstrated. Has somebody out there done something like this.
>
> Hi,
>
> we have just started investigating CORBA as a link between (possibly
> multiple) Ada servers on Unix and Java clients. Unfortunately the
> only product available for Ada appears to be IONA's Orbix. At the
> CUC'97 in Munich a number of people told me it was hardly worth
> considering (too buggy, too incomplete etc.). Also the Ada Orbix is
> still based on the old CORBA standard, whereas all Java ORBs are
> already CORBA 2.0 - ugh.
> Has anyone had any experience with Orbix/Ada? Does it work? Is it
> usable? Are there any plans to catch up with CORBA 2.0?

Hopefully our customers are not too busy to follow up on this article.
We do have many customers that are successfully building applications
with Orbix/Ada.

One customer, CACI, was funded by DISA (along with Lockheed-Martin)
to participate in an interoperability demo that included C++
and Java ORBs.  Our customer at CACI reports that the _least_
number of problems occurred with Orbix/Ada.  The CACI customer
(Lee Patton) in his paper in the Washington Ada Symposium 1997
proceedings said:

     "Overall, we had great success using Ada 95 and CORBA."

     "A client implemented in Ada 95 seamlessly interoperated
      with a server constructed in C++.  A server implemented
      in Ada 95 seamlessly interoperated with a client
      implemented in Java."

Re: the CORBA 2.0 issue.  Orbix/Ada is fully compliant with the
forthcoming CORBA 2.1 language mapping specification.  The current
Orbix/Ada product (1.2) does not use IIOP as its primary protocol.

When the all Ada ORB was built last year it was architected
around the GIOP messaging protocol (i.e. IIOP) and predictable
time behavior.  IONA demanded that we first support the proprietary
Orbix protocol so we complied.  We are working hard on completing
our support of IIOP at the moment.

The feature priorities for the Orbix/Ada product are focused on
the support of realtime.  We are working on native ATM support
as well as other high speed, predictable transports.

Re: Java ORB's CORBA 2.0 support.  _None_ of the Java ORBs are
CORBA 2.0 compliant WRT the language mapping.  The mapping was
just approved in Feb 97.  They just recently began supporting
IIOP.  This makes sense since the Java ORBs were built more
recently.

Note that by default Orbix/C++ uses Orbix protocol just like
Orbix/Ada.  OrbixWeb (Java) uses IIOP by default, but does
support Orbix protocol.  This causes no end of confusion when
people try to make OrbixWeb interoperate with either Orbix/C++
or Orbix/Ada.  OrbixWeb will interoperate with the current
Orbix/Ada product using Orbix protocol.

-- Bill

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