Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!MathWorks.Com!yeshua.marcam.com!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!chsun!hslrswi!oregon!dbrunner
From: dbrunner@hslrswi.hasler.ascom.ch (Dierk Brunner)
Subject: Re: HP's Distributed VisualWorks?
Message-ID: <1994Sep27.084430.13570@hasler.ascom.ch>
Sender: news@hasler.ascom.ch
Reply-To: dbrunner@hslrswi.hasler.ascom.ch
Organization: Ascom Hasler AG
References: <RSHAPIRO.94Sep22125108@pilsner.bbn.com>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 1994 08:44:30 GMT
Lines: 37

In article 94Sep22125108@pilsner.bbn.com, rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro) writes:
>Anyone have any hands-on experience with HP's new CORBA-compliant
>VisualWorks add-on? I read their paper on Smalltalk CORBA compliancy,
>it seemed reasonably clean and well-thought-out to me (aside from a
>few minor stylistic quirks) -- no surprise, really, since CORBA
>objects and methods are semantically very similar to Smalltalk's
>
>I'm not sure how much of what was described in the paper was actually
>implemented for this release, or how it was implemented -- does it
>require a change to VW virtual machine, or is it a set of new classes
>and methods that are loaded into ordinary VW?

HP says, that HP Distributed Smalltalk is the only complete implementation of
CORBA 1.1 that is available, now. They implemented additional objects like
composed objects and some development tools they want to become part of future
versions of the CORBA standard.

VisualWorks 2.0 is not supported, now, but it will be supported until the end of
this year. Security is one of the missing features of the current implementation
(security is not part of CORBA 1.1).

HP Distributed Smalltalk is using Unix sockets to communicate with other processes,
thus the virtual machine needs not to be changed (the primitives needed are already
in the virtual machine).

>Are any other Smalltalks dealing with distributed computing in a
>reasonable way? SmalltalkAgents maybe?

	Dierk Brunner


-------------------------------------------------------
Dierk Brunner / NVEK3, Ascom Hasler AG, Belpstrasse 37,
     CH-3000 Bern 14, Switzerland, +41 31 999 2063
-------------------------------------------------------


