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Re: QuantLib CORBA vs. SOAP

Posted by enrico.sirola-3 on Jan 08, 2002; 3:43am
URL: http://quantlib.414.s1.nabble.com/QuantLib-CORBA-vs-SOAP-tp1831p1832.html

Hi Enrique - nice name btw ;-),

>>>>> "Enrique" == Enrique Melero <[hidden email]> writes:

    Enrique> El Viernes 04 Enero 2002 15:15, escribiste:

    >> > TermStructure interface would be a GREAT achievement,
    >> something that > would really boost our project.
    >>
    >> is there some demand out there for using QuantLib via CORBA?
    >> i'm just trying to get an idea of the general interest in this
    >> endeavor.

I would be very intrested.

    Enrique> IMHO , spending efforts in CORBA instead of SOAP is an
    Enrique> error.  I know a commercial product using CORBA to
    Enrique> provide server based financial analytics. It has taken 5
    Enrique> years of development with endless problems about the
    Enrique> CORBA versions and complex client architecture. In the
    Enrique> end the CORBA interface stays only internally to provide
    Enrique> distributed calculation capabilities but it has been
    Enrique> dropped from the desktop for the obvious problems (
    Enrique> licensing etc ) .

hmmm in my opinion, CORBA and SOAP are both cool, with different
application fields. SOAP, presently, means HTTP, SMTP and ascii
transfers with all it implies: loosely coupled client and server
(good) and not very excellent performances (bad), while CORBA has a
more efficient way to marshal objects (good) at the cost of tighter
coupling between remote processes (bad). I think i wouldn't like a
SOAP-based publish/subscribe system for market data, for this stuff
COM or CORBA are probably better solutions (i.e. transfering very
frequently small amounts of data) - does any1 out there have direct
experience of market data publishing via SOAP?

Licensing is a problem with commercial full-featured CORBA solutions,
anyway there are opensource full featured CORBA orbs you can
install on a zillion clients at no cost. I specially like OmniORB
(http://www.omniorb.org) for its python support. It doesn't support
object by value, anyway has tremendously good performances (there
should be a benchmark somewhere on their website).

I think the real problem with CORBA is to use it in on a wide area
network environment. Here you need CORBA-aware application-level
firewalls -- there is an OMG spec about it, but I didn't see any
proposed implementation in freesoftwareland.
Cheers,
Enrico

--
Enrico Sirola <[hidden email]>
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