ANNOUNCEMENT: Free CORBA 2 ORB - omniORB 2.5.0 released

[Eoin Carroll]

       *******  Free CORBA 2 ORB for C++ available now  *******

                                      
The Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory has made available the second
public release of omniORB (version 2.5.0). We also refer to this version
as omniORB2.

The main change since the last public release (release 2.4.0) is the addition
of support for type Any and TypeCode. For further details of the changes, see
http://www.orl.co.uk/omniORB/omniORB_250/

omniORB2 is copyright Olivetti & Oracle Research Laboratory. It is free
software. The programs in omniORB2 are distributed under the GNU General
Public Licence as published by the Free Software Foundation. The libraries
in omniORB2 are distributed under the GNU Library General Public
Licence.

Source code and binary distributions are available from our Web pages:

         http://www.orl.co.uk/omniORB/omniORB.html


Technical Highlights
====================

omniORB2 implements specification 2.0 of the Common Object Request 
Broker Architecture (CORBA).

    - C++ language bindings are supported. The mapping conforms to 
      the latest revision of the CORBA specification.

    - The Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) is used as the native protocol.

    - The omniORB2 runtime is fully multithreaded. It uses native platform 
      thread support encapsulated with a small class library, omnithread,
      to abstract away from differences in native thread APIs.

    - `Typecode' and the type `Any' are supported.

    - A COS Naming Service, omniNames, is provided.

    - The following platforms are supported:
 
      o Solaris 2.5 / Sun SparcCompiler C++ version 4.2
      o Digital Unix 3.2 / DEC C++ compiler version 5.5
      o x86 Linux 2.0 / GNU C++ compiler version 2.7.2 / Linuxthreads 0.5
      o x86 Windows NT / Windows 95 / Visual C++ version 5.0

      Ports to the following platforms are available. These ports are done by
      external contributors and have been integrated into the source tree.
      For these platforms, no pre-compiled binary is available.

      o IBM AIX 4.2/ IBM C Set++ 3.1.4
      o HPUX 10.20/ aC++ (B3910 A.01.04)
      o OpenVMS Alpha 6.2/ DEC C++ compiler 5.5  (UCX 4.1 ECO 8)
      o OpenVMS Vax 6.1/ DEC C++ compiler 5.5  (UCX 4.0 ECO 1)
      o NextStep 3.3/ gcc-2.7.2

      This release has also been tested with egcc-1.0 that has been patched to 
      support thread-safe exception handling.

      The ports to Mac OS and SGI Irix 6.x are known to exist. However, the 
      ports have not been merged into the source tree yet.

      It should be straightforward to port omniORB2 to any platform 
      which supports POSIX style threads, BSD style sockets and has a 
      decent C++ compiler which supports exceptions.

    - It has been tested for interoperability via IIOP with other ORBs, 
      such as Iona Orbix 2.2 MT, Iona OrbixWeb 2.0.1, 
      Visigenic Visibroker for C++, and HP ORB Plus 2.5.

Work in progress
================

omniORB2 is not yet a complete implementation of the CORBA core. The
following features are not supported in the current release. 
Support for these features will be included shortly in a future release of 
omniORB2.

    - Dynamic Any (DynAny) not yet supported. This is currently being 
      implemented. Please visit the omniORB home page for latest updates.

    - The Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII) is not supported. 

    - The Dynamic Skeleton Interface (DSI) is not supported. 


Missing features
================

The following features are missing from omniORB2. We are not 
currently planning on adding support for these features.

    - The BOA only supports the persistent server activation policy. Other
      dynamic activation and deactivation polices are not supported.

    - omniORB2 does not has its own Interface Repository.