Blogs

After several months of hard work we are almost ready with our IDL to C++11 Language mapping. The full team has worked on a reference implementation in parallel. Everything we wanted to achieve has been accomplished, in fact, it even got better!

The new mapping will be much easier and safer to use. A lot of errors are now just impossible to make, the compiler will reject the application code. Also the new C++11 move semantics will lead to a more performant implementation than with plain C++!

Some time ago I was invited by the NATO TTCP working group to talk about some of the work we have been doing the last years. We prepared a presentation which I delivered to the NATO TTCP working group in London on October 24th.

The feedback on our ideas was positive. There was more intested in DDS4CCM and the days where really busy. The next weeks I am going to catch up with the other attendants to see how we can leverage efforts.

Last week I attended the OMG meeting in Kissimmee. We had a list of interesting topics prepared. Before the Architecture Board we presented the IDL to C++ 1.3 RTF and the Ruby CORBA Language Mapping 1.1 RTF. Both RTFs went smoothly through the process and the AB voted in favor of both RTFs. Both are now on the voting list for the PTC and hopefully they become both official standards soon.

Remedy IT is making the TAO Programmers Guide (TPG) available for free at their website. Due to resource constraints we haven't been able to update it as frequently as we wanted to do.

We are searching for feedback on the TPG. What are the sections you think should be added and in which format do you want to have the TPG to be available? Feel free to send me your comments directly.

At the last OMG meeting we asked to OMG to charter a RTF for the IDL to C++ specification. This has been chartered and we have finished the documents for the IDL to C++ 1.3 specification. The OMG published these at the Work In Progress page for review.

As part of our DDS4CCM solution we had to integrate RTI DDS into our product. The goal was to have a solution that could easily switch between DDS vendors. RTI doesn't follow the formal IDL to C++ mapping, they have created their own custom language mapping that is RTI specific. In the past more people wanted to use IDL to C++, therefore the RTI product does contain a CORBA Compatibility Kit (CCK). This CCK is only focused on the user defined types, not on the builtin types like DomainParticipant, Publisher, Subscriber, Reader, and Writer.

With the help from OCI and a lot of puzzling at my side we are a step forward in our DDS4CCM implementation. With some local patches we are now able to deploy the CIAO DDS4CCM Shapes example using OpenDDS as underlying DDS vendor.

This is a good step forward in the ability to support multiple DDS vendors by just switching the vendor in the MPC default.feature file. For full support of OpenDDS we still need to perform work in the DDS4CCM implementation, but also OpenDDS has to be extended to support the XML based QoS configuration.

Currently we are very busy looking at a new IDL to C++11 mapping. Various ideas have been give and we are going through the details step by step. A lot of people start using CORBA by compiling and running the Hello world example. Below two versions or a new IDL to C++11 variant of this example, in the first we have taken the effort to type all variables by hand, in the second we are using the new C++11 keyword auto.

Last week I assisted one of our customers with an upgrade of TAO 1.4 to TAO 2.0.2. Initially the developers where very concerned and expected a lot of problems. They already tried to upgrade in the past but got a lot of errors and didn't know how they could resolve these.

Regularly I am contacted by people who ask about new or existing ports of TAO. TAO can be supported on many platforms and compilers, but it seems there are a lot of different ways to define supported. The open source community just delivers you the code, no guarantees are given regarding the product, it is just delivered as is. As commercial support provider we can deliver guarantees about the quality of a port.

Let me start with how I personally would approach any port: