DOM implementation for Linux?

[Miles Sabin]

Aaron Gaudio wrote,
> Specifically, I'd like the ability for various applications to
> navigate/modify a DOM structure trasnparent to network and process,
> using the standard IDL (and hence, CORBA) provided by W3 for the DOM.
> Are there any existing libraries that allow this in Linux?

I don't think there are any DOM implementations on _any_ platform which 
can be usefully exported via CORBA.

The W3C DOM WG only used CORBA IDL as a language-neutral API 
specification language, and there wasn't any serious expectation that 
the IDL would be used as IDL. If you look closely you'll notice that 
the official target-language bindings (which are published alongside 
the IDL in the DOM REC) don't exactly match what you'd expect to get if 
you ran the offical IDL through an IDL compiler. In part this was 
because there were a few things the WG needed which went beyond what 
can be specified in IDL, and in part because they wanted to make the 
bindings a little more idiomatic for the target languages. I forget the 
exact details ...

Even if this wasn't the case, the official IDL would be pretty hopeless 
for remote use: it's _much_ too fine-grained. I believe that the OMG 
did some work on a DOM-like IDL which would actually be usable, but 
I've no idea if that ever saw the light of day.

If you're wondering why on earth the WG did things this way, bear in 
mind that this was all going on at the height of the browser/Java wars: 
the WG was attempting to keep all the major players on board and not 
alienate any of them by making any firm commitment to _any_ particular 
host language. As is usual with this kind of committee driven exercise 
in compromise the end result is something that nobody's particularly 
happy with.

Cheers,


Miles