CORBA Example

Library

Tested with Functional Developer 2.0.

You can download the source here: Random number source (4KB)

Overview

Functional Developer can be extended with a CORBA Orb with POA support. Some good examples of using the CORBA Orb are included. These include a three-tier bank example which demonstrates a client application accessing a middle tier of CORBA objects which access a database using the ODBC libraries and an example of a network game.

I've written a quick sample of using Functional Developer to access the true random number generator available on the Internet from www.random.org. This website provides a means of getting true random numbers through a CORBA interface. The sample available below is a simple client that can be used to retrieve the random numbers and use them in a Dylan program.

The code of interest is in the corba-random/client/corba-random-client.dylan file. This file opens the file containing the random number server IOR, converts it to the Corba object and calls the random number generation methods on it. The IOR file and the IDL file were obtained from www.random.org.

For more information on programming with CORBA, the book 'Advanced CORBA Programming with C++' is an excellent book. It shows detailed information on using CORBA and various CORBA services. It uses C++ as the implementation language but it is easy to convert to equivalent Dylan code if you know both languages. One of the good things about the book is the fact that it uses an orb with POA support which is applicable to the Dylan Orb. The BOA support in some older CORBA books is not as readily useable to learn programming with the Dylan Orb.