I'm currently attending the OMG Technical meeting in St. Louis. I came here to present on two topics:
- IONA would like the OMG to standardize a CORBA binding for WSDL. Such a binding, which we already successfully support in our Artix product, allows CORBA servers to be abstracted to more easily handle invocations from non-CORBA clients, and to allow multi-middleware clients (similar to those of WSIF) to natively invoke CORBA services without requiring SOAP-IIOP gateways. I'll present a draft Request for Proposals (RFP) for this at the next meeting. (I hope this doesn't reignite the recent "WSDL vs. IDL" debate.)
- I presented some further progress on my work to add reflection/introspection into CORBA. Such a facility would make integration of CORBA systems with other middleware easier. I originally described this work in a C/C++ Users Journal article, but I've modified it quite a bit since that article was published. One major change, for example, is to add the ability to obtain object metadata in the form of a CORBA 3.x ExtFullInterfaceDescription struct, as suggested by Frank Pilhofer from Mercury, which keeps applications from having to use the Interface Repository (which nobody really uses anyway). I'm hoping the OMG will eventually adopt work this via its Request for Comments (RFC) process, but I still have work to do on the metadata XML schema.
After I presented this morning, I spent the afternoon and evening finishing up my OOPSLA paper reviews. Boy, was that a lot of work! It was well worth it, though -- looks like some really good papers will be presented at OOPSLA this year.