Re: First draft of "OROCOS II" proposal...

Christian Schlegel writes:
| So I decided with Orocos::SmartSoft to hide the communication layer such
| that the user space does not contain any CORBA details anymore and that one
| can even exchange the underlying middleware.

Note that we've been saying this from the very beginning of Orocos...
But since I've been working with this idea in mind, a few doubts have
shown up. Maybe you'll have answers :)

If you hide CORBA... why use CORBA at all? CORBA is already an
abstraction of remote procedure calls and, to me, abstrating an
abstration doesn't make much sense (even not talking about the
overhead).

The CORBA approach is complex, that's true. If you hide it under a
simpler layer... then you don't need all the complexity of CORBA, do you?
If you can switch between different communication mechanisms
transparently, then you're tight to the simplest of the mechanisms you
would like to use..

Maybe you'll answer: interoperability, standards, etc. But if you use
RPC (or XML-RPC, or whatever), aren't you interoperable in the same way?
Aren't these approaches standards too?

Thus I think that if one want to use CORBA, then one doesn't want to hide
it, because CORBA was designed to provide a more powerful approach than
existing ones, and it _is_ the abstraction already. This is complex, and
that's the price... It doesn't make sense to use a complex and powerful
infrastructure if it's hidden behind a simpler one...

I'm still convinced that the user space shouldn't contain any details on
the communication layer, though :)