Regular Expressions: Manage CORBA with scripting

We like to do a lot with a little. That's the attraction of scripting: it manages big,

complicated computing systems -- CORBA, for example -- with simple, low-cost means.

We affectionately call CORBA "complicated." This column explains why, and touches on

other news in the scripting world.

CORBA is a specification for distribution of objects; CORBA is an acronym for Common

Object Request Broker Architecture. Some older literature punctuates that "Common Object

Request Broker: Architecture." The Object Management Group is an industry consortium -- with

a long membership list -- whose principal product is the CORBA specification. Version 1.0

appeared in October 1991.

CORBA is most often compared to Microsoft's DCOM protocol, the still rather raw .Net, and

Sun ONE. CORBA incorporates elements from throughout the history of distributed computing,

including lower-level precursors such as network file system (NFS) and remote procedure call

(RPC), vanquished rivals like OpenDoc, and a variety of academic projects in distributed

operating systems.

For the purpose of this column, the main point to take from CORBA's history is that the

protocol is a smashing success. We mean this in a precise sense: CORBA 1.0 was difficult,

expensive, and esoteric. Ten years later, CORBA costs little or nothing (at least in some

varieties), it is widely used, and hobbyists and students expect to use it safely.

Multipage "Hello, World!"

CORBA has been tamed, but it remains a heavyweight. CORBA tutorials need to introduce

several concepts, including object request brokers (ORBs) and the interface definition

language (IDL), before the first exhibition of a usefully distributed "Hello, World!"

That is where scripting languages come in. All the leading open source scripting

languages have serviceable CORBA modules that factor out most or all of the "boilerplate"

necessary to make a CORBA application run. Many production systems are coded partly or

entirely in languages such as Perl, Python, and Tcl.

That is rather remarkable. Although CORBA was designed all along to be language-neutral,

early work was done almost entirely in C/C++ and closely-related "systems languages."

Because of skepticism about whether attempts to script CORBA would ever work, a committee

was formed to demonstrate a scripted binding.

By the time a rather Pythonic CorbaScript was released, though, general-purpose scripting

languages had already begun to establish themselves as fit CORBA tools. CorbaScript is a

nice language; a simple script for invoking a standard "Hello, World!" might look like

this:

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