[[omniORB] omniORB 4 feature list]

Sai-Lai Lo S.Lo@uk.research.att.com
13 Mar 2001 15:15:28 +0000


>>>>> Jack P writes:

> 1] AMI Callback & Polling both methods will be there in OmniORB 4 ?

Yes. (This does not imply that OBV is fully supported.)

> 2] Currently OmniORB uses loopback TCP/IP for local calls.Any comment
> on using shared memory for that.

Unix socket will be supported. Shared memory is an option that may be done
in time for the 4.0 release. 

When the ORB is about to invoke on a server which seems to be on the same
machine, it will first try the fast local transport, e.g. unix socket, and
falls back to tcp loopback if that fails. 

> 3] Comment on QoS for client timeouts while calling remote methods.

The ORB internal can now do remote calls in any timeout settings and on a
call by call basis. I'm not convinced this is necessarily a good
programming practice if the application has to rely on call timeout. It
seems to me the reason why an application programmer wants call timeout is
because she wants to avoid a thread being blocked indefinitely.  The remote
end may be dead or just slow. In the first case, I think a more systematic
approach to failure detection and server "rejunvenation" is preferable. In
the second case, a work queue with multiple threads doing the remote calls
may be a better solution. I am interested in making a toolkit that does the
2 things and exposes a simple API that the application programmer can use
by adding a few lines of code to her program. This of course is not part of
omniORB 4 so I'm a bit off topic..

omniORB 4 has always been available via our CVS. It will take a while to be
feature complete but will just be weeks away to be useful. I'll post a
message when it is ready for "early adopters".

Sai-Lai


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Sai-Lai Lo                                   S.Lo@uk.research.att.com
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