On Mon, 2005-03-28 at 19:21 +0100, Miles Sabin wrote: > I don't think there are any DOM implementations on _any_ platform which > can be usefully exported via CORBA. > > The W3C DOM WG only used CORBA IDL as a language-neutral API > specification language, and there wasn't any serious expectation that > the IDL would be used as IDL. [...] > If you're wondering why on earth the WG did things this way, bear in > mind that this was all going on at the height of the browser/Java wars: > the WG was attempting to keep all the major players on board and not > alienate any of them by making any firm commitment to _any_ particular > host language. As is usual with this kind of committee driven exercise > in compromise the end result is something that nobody's particularly > happy with. Thanks for the info. Actually I prefer things like that be specified in IDL wherever possible (even if there is no intent on using CORBA). I'm becoming disillusioned with libraries choosing a reference language and then waiting for someone to decide to write other language bindings that always end up being 2-3 months behind the main language. IDL may not be perfect, but (in theory) it could provide way for libraries to export their APIs in an object-oriented way to all languages that have an IDL mapping (that's assuming there is a way to load a native library and make in-process calls to it via IDL bindings without requiring the overhead of CORBA marshalling, etc.).
