White Paper: GNOME Technologies

CORBA in GNOME

GNOME provides intercommunication for applications through CORBA. CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) was started by the Object Management Group [1](OMG) to allow interoperability among the many available hardware and software products.

CORBA is designed to allow applications to communicate with each other, no matter where they are located (local or network) or how they were implemented (language/operating system).

For example, a program written in the C language running on a Linux system would be able to use CORBA to send a request to a program written in Python running on a Windows system, without ever having to worry about the programming language or operating system in use.

For this communication to work there is an important piece that has to be present—the Object Request Broker (ORB). Simply stated, the ORB is the middleware that allows the communication to occur between the two applications.

ORBit. ORBit [2]is an ORB that was adopted by the GNOME project. When the decision was first made that CORBA would be implemented in GNOME, there were a few ORBs that could have been used. Most ORBs had licensing problems and were quickly left out.

Then, a couple of hackers wrote a small, lightweight ORB called ORBit. ORBit has developed rapidly, and once there was a stable release, many GNOME applications started to take advantage of it.

ORBit fit well into the GNOME project primarily because it does not have any licensing problems. Like GTK+, it is licensed under the GNU LGPL.

Secondly, ORBit is resource-friendly. It is a very fast implementation of CORBA and has proven to be one of the lightest ORBs available in terms of system resource usage.

Finally, because ORBit is a free software project, the development has been rapid enough to quickly meet the needs of the GNOME project.

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