[bexsella]

Unfortunately I know exactly what CORBA means. Helming a legacy project that still contains the requirement of using CORBA is a real bugbear of mine. It takes non-trivial effort to even build the ORB we use (OmniORB) for each platform we support (the number is low, currently 4) that its effectively the only library we don't build from source each time. Every now and then, someone struggles to build it, we then check in the built libraries and forget about it for as long as we can.

[chris_wot]

Isn't that a problem with OmniORB and no CORBA?

[bexsella]

I started writing then went on to automatically vent. I extend my apologies for wasting everyone's bandwidth. There are better technologies to use that can do pretty well everything that CORBA offers. That's the source of my general frustration, OmniORB just extends that frustration.

[adev_]

> extend my apologies for wasting everyone's bandwidth.

No excuses needed, it is still informative.

Curious question: What are the technical/political reasons to keep ORB/Corba in your project right now ?

[bexsella]

There's no strict technical reason for keeping Corba around. It's primarily an issue of finance. Where I work there's no real way to get funding for a maintenance task if it doesn't directly relate to a specific project (we produce a product that is utilised by various projects, and through those projects get the funding for new features, and maintenance). There's no external call to not use Corba, so we will continue to use Corba.

This is now a compounding issue, the tool that uses Corba was initially quite standalone but managers started pushing the tool as an interface to the embedded system I actually work on, this has resulted in more tools utilising Corba.

[chris_wot]

Nah, not a waste of time - I understand the feeling!

[skissane]

I suspect it is related though - CORBA is a zombie technology, so a lot of the code related to it is old and crusty, predates contemporary best practices, etc - and all that could be fixed, but its status as a dying technology means almost nobody has the motivation to spend the effort to fix those issues (anyone hit by them is likely going to decide that time and money is better spent replacing CORBA than improving their CORBA implementation), and as a result many of those issues will likely never get fixed

[p_l]

More that most of the better quality stuff is proprietary, and often mixed with somewhat specific environments with specific kinds of clients... and thus not really supported in the open.

A lot of the time I'd say CORBA and related stack (DDS, for example) is better than what came to replace it, depending on the task :/