Re: SOAP and CORBA

At 12:44 AM 1/2/2002 +0000, Nick Loman wrote:

Hello PHP developers, Interesting to think about what might make a nice foundation technology for all the exciting potential of PHP5. SOAP is obviously an important technology for websites in the future. But given that (I guess) most of us are not really that keen to follow in the nervous footsteps of Microsoft, and given that XML brings me out in a horrible rash, why don't we think about CORBA as a fundamental PHP technology? CORBA is now finally in a state where people can actually use it without running away screaming. There are now enough free implementations on enough platforms to enable mainstream PHP support. David Eriksson has done some nice stuff with Universe/Satellite, but I don't think PHP's CORBA support is currentl "plug n' go" enough to really be capitalised on (it currently relies on a fair amount of knowledge of CORBA). What would be fantastic is a situation where newbie PHP coders feel confident enough to use CORBA services exposed to the Internet (not many exist at the moment, the "classic" example is Random.org but this could change). If it was easy enough to start interacting with ORBs exposed to the 'Net, and it was easy enough for PHP developers to write their own net-facing ORBs, we could potentially be facing an interesting paradigm shift whereby PHP users are exposing their interesting objects (which may, e.g. provide access to databases, content) to the 'net. Much sexier than say RDF, no? If anyone would like to help me in my quest to make CORBA more mainstream (CORBA isn't really scary, at its most basic its just cross-platform remote procedure calls) I would love to work with you. All the best for 2002 everyone,

We are going to try to improve the object overloading in ZE2 so I suggest not working on this before we see what we can come up with. Basically we are just trying to make it easier for people to overload objects from C and make it a bit more powerful. In the meanwhile you can still play around with different Corba implementations and choose how you're going to do it but I suggest waiting because it'll hopefully save you lots of headaches. Andi