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I know that CORBA exchanges data using IDL, which supports binary format. Could someone please explain if it is possible to exchange data in ASCII ?

THinking you in advance for reply

make
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1 Answers1

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CORBA uses IDL to describe the data and operations. For actual transfer it uses some IOP - inter orb protocol. While in theory there could be ORB that defines and implements its proprietary text based IOP, I am not aware of any that does this, and every major ORB uses and provides IIOP which stands for Internet IOP, and uses binary encoding.

If on the other hand you are just interested in transferring text messages by using CORBA and not in details of ORB implementation, surely you can transfer text messages between 2 ORBS.

Davorin Ruševljan
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  • thanks a lot for your reply. currently I am evaluating different IPC according to a number of requirements. One of the requirements is the capbility for an IPC to support the data exchange in the form of ASCII, binary and XML. As it felt you have a good expertise on CORBA, I'd like to know if CORBA could meet this requirement. What I know is in CORBA, IDL is used to produce binary programs (stub and skeleton) to be used by concurrent processes. thanks again for sharing your knowledge with me ... – make Feb 11 '13 at 21:39
  • Well as log as you have CORBA on both sides of communication, you can use it to transfer strings, and embed anything in those strings, XML, json or what ever. It is not way of using CORBA that will make most of it but it would work. What would not work is to have CORBA on one side, and on the other side same client not written in CORBA just expecting xmls strings comming out of the connection. – Davorin Ruševljan Feb 12 '13 at 00:01
  • Thanks ... it may be a good idea. CDR - common data representation- is used by CORBA as IDL , can this be used by another form of IPC (e.g. sockets program) or not? Regards and thanks a lot again – make Feb 12 '13 at 02:58
  • In theory maybe yes, but that client would need to reimplement good part of CORBA from the scratch. It is hard for me to grasp exactly what you need to do, but let me put this way, if you are going to put CORBA on both sides of communication, and need protocol that is relatively compact on the wire with interface defined with IDL, CORBA can be a good choice. If you want to other non CORBA software to connect to CORBA server, than it is a bad choice. – Davorin Ruševljan Feb 12 '13 at 07:40
  • thanks a lot again for your answer ... just another point, if you don't mind. Can CDR be exploited by other implementations, instead of CORBA. thanks! – make Feb 12 '13 at 20:30
  • Yes it could be, or at least some subset of it. It is relatively well specified mapping from IDL to byte stream representation. – Davorin Ruševljan Feb 12 '13 at 22:13
  • CDR can be used independent of CORBA. If you check out ACE (see www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt), it has support for CDR without that you get a full CORBA implementation like TAO. – Johnny Willemsen Feb 18 '13 at 08:28