From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,dbc63810b4ca3da5 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2003-10-23 12:14:33 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news2.google.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!sn-xit-03!sn-xit-04!sn-xit-06!sn-post-02!sn-post-01!supernews.com!corp.supernews.com!not-for-mail From: Victor Giddings Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Is CORBA dead for Ada Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 19:14:29 -0000 Organization: Objective Interface System Message-ID: References: User-Agent: Xnews/5.04.25 X-Complaints-To: abuse@supernews.com Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:1537 Date: 2003-10-23T19:14:29+00:00 List-Id: Laurent Pautet wrote in news:bn145s$1kbk$1@avanie.enst.fr: > It seems to me that the CORBA mapping for Ada is almost dead. The last > official document is formal/01-10-42 for CORBA 2.3. > > The ada-rtf team does not seem to be very active in its job to update > the mapping (the last closed issues are from 1999). > > OIS which seems to lead this task force is very shy in its promotion > of Ada on its web site. I will feed this back to our marketing team. We are not shy in our promotion of Ada. In the last OMG Real-Time Workshop in response to a comment, I was accused of being "an unrepentent Ada programmer". At which point, my boss exclaimed "damned right we are"! > TopGraph'X is still promoting its Ada products. If ORB-River is > compatible with CORBA 2.6, it seems that it does not include new > features from versions greater than 2.3. > > Does anyone have fresh news on the OMG activities around the Ada > mapping ? > > -- > -- Laurent Dirk Craeynest was kind enough to repost my responses to a similar thread on comp.object.corba and inform me of this thread. I would like to expand on some of the earlier responses. There seems to be much apprehension and more than a little misunderstanding associated with CORBA "versions". CORBA is not a monolithic specification but a collection of adopted specifications that may or may not be consolidated into individual documents. The individual documents have associated Revision Task Forces (RTFs) and individual life cycles. The references such as CORBA 2.6 are more properly references to a particular version of the "CORBA Core" specification, a particular document that specifies the language-independent requirements of what an ORB product must implement. Changes to the CORBA Core specification may or may not require changes to the language mapping specifications, depending on whether there is a significant change to the IDL language. Therefore, a lot of revision of the CORBA Core would have been addressed by changing the last digit in the statement that the mapping was "aligned to CORBA version 2.x". There is understandable confusion about this that has been partly caused by the OMG itself. First of all, the CORBA Core document contains a lot of things, e.g. CORBA/COM Interworking, that don't have to be implemented by an ORB product. The OMG staff have also issued press releases that claimed what the contents of CORBA x.x would contain. In general, this is a problem that needs to be fixed. In addition to being the chair of the Ada RTF, I am chair of a group in the OMG called the Product Specification Definition (psdef) subcommittee that is trying to straighten out publication organization and coordination of versioning. I urge you to participate. The bottom line is that the fact that the current Ada Language Mapping specification is "aligned to CORBA 2.3" means very little. As I stated in the comp.object.corba post, the OMG IDL language is fairly stable, so few changes in the language mapping are needed. Most of the features added in the CORBA Core 2.4 and later versions are specified in a language independent manner and have not affected the language mapping. So, as Jean- Claude Mahieux was able to report, there has been no hindrance to advancing Ada ORB implementations. That being said, the other responders are correct in that there has not been an active Ada Mapping RTF is almost 3 years. My only excuse for this is that we have been busy with other OMG specifications like Real-Time CORBA (1.0 and 2.0), Fault Tolerant CORBA, Data Distribution, etc., etc.. (I'm not sure what excuse my competitors have ;) Nevertheless, there is currently an active RTF attempting to deal with the backlog. Anyone may participate in this activity by joining the email group (ada-rtf- request@omg.org) Non-OMG members may need to contact me to be added to the list. Voting membership (one per organization) in the RTF requires a minimal level of membership in the OMG but, in practice, most voting is pro-forma after a consensus has been worked out among us. Let me know if you are interested in formal membership, so this can be placed on the PTC agenda. -- Victor Giddings mailto:victor.giddings@ois.com Senior Scientist +1 703 295 6500 Objective Interface Systems Fax: +1 703 295 6501