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List:       kde-core-devel
Subject:    Re: Why aren't we using CORBA anymore ?
From:       Rik Hemsley <rik () kde ! org>
Date:       2000-05-02 1:20:42
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Ok, I cut out the stupid questions from my alter-ego, fixed the
semi-stupid ones and, hopefully, fixed the answers.

Thanks to Kurt and David for the insight.

Sorry for spamming the list with all this stuff, but as I said, if I'm going
to make statements like 'Using CORBA for embedding kills stability, murders
speed and terrifies developers', then I might have to answer this stuff.

(BTW, the actual statement used may differ from that above ;)

R: CORBA gives poor stability

M: In what way ?

R: If you're going to embed a widget that exists in a separate process, then
   pass events between the widget and the process, you drastically increase
   the number of Things That Might Go Wrong.

M: How is this different with kparts ?

R: The difference with kparts is that an embedded widget lives in a shared
   library. The widget is _part_ of the application.

----

R: CORBA is slow.

M: What makes you say that ?

R: When you're embedding a widget from a remote process and the process
   communicates with that widget via CORBA, there is a _lot_ of traffic
   generated. Every GUI event must be passed. Whether your remote process is
   on the same machine as the client or not, you still have a huge speed
   problem. Embedding using the shared library approach completely removes
   this problem.

----

R: CORBA has a relatively steep learning curve and this put off many
   developers. kparts+DCOP by contrast have a very shallow learning curve.

M: Why is this such a problem ?

R: We want developers to be able to get into using the component-based model
   quickly.

----

R: In the end, using this supposedly wonderful mechanism that would allow us
   to do distributed computing seemed rather pointless when desktops are
   local in nearly all cases anyway.

M: Are you saying that you dropped CORBA because it gave you an _extra_
   feature ?

R: No, we're saying we dropped CORBA because it was too difficult to use
   without sacrificing speed and stability, plus making the learning curve
   for KDE developers much steeper than we wanted. BTW, see (that PDF about
   distributed apps).

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