Preface

Product

Open Dylan supports the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) defined by Object Management Group, Inc. (OMG).

The Open Dylan Object Request Broker (ORB) and supporting tools provide CORBA architecture functionality to Dylan programmers, combining standardized distributed system development with a state-of-the-art dynamic object-functional language.

Parts

The CORBA components included in Open Dylan are:

  1. An IDL (Interface Definition Language) compiler

    This comes in two forms:

    1. some DLLs linked into the Open Dylan development environment, and console Dylan compiler, to allow IDL files to be included in Dylan projects. This integrates CORBA into the Open Dylan project manager and build system.

    2. a standalone IDL compiler called console-scepter

  2. An ORB runtime library

    This consists of the dylan-orb library and several of the libraries on which it depends.

  3. Some example CORBA projects including:

    • corba-hello-world

    • bank

    • chat

    These are found in the Examples subfolder to the top-level Open Dylan installation folder on Windows, or in sources/corba/demos in the source repository.

  4. This manual

Audience

This book is intended for use by application programmers who wish to build CORBA applications using Dylan. The book assumes that the reader is familiar with both the Dylan programming language and with building distributed applications using CORBA.

Standards compliance

The Open Dylan Dylan ORB currently conforms to the CORBA 2.0 specification with some elements of CORBA 2.2, most notably the Portable Object Adapter (POA).

Further reading

Many resources exist for those who want to learn about CORBA and distributed software development.

Ciaran McHale’s CORBA Explained Simply is an excellent overview of CORBA concepts and the CORBA ecosystem. The Other CORBA Resources chapter of that book contains helpful links to CORBA books and other related resources.

Michi Henning’s The Rise and Fall of CORBA outlines the history, including the successes and failures, of the CORBA standards.