Ada bindings for the ORBit  CORBA ORB

ORBit-Ada is a Sourceforge hosted project. The ORBit-Ada project page can be found here.

What It Is

ORBit-Ada is a project to develop Ada bindings for the ORBit2 Corba ORB. ORBit-Ada is Free Software (OpenSource), copyrighted under the GPL and GMGPL (GNAT Modified GPL.)

How It's Done

The ORBit Ada binding is implemented by GNACK, the GNU Ada CORBA Kit. GNACK consists of an IDL parser and Ada code generator (both written in Perl), and CORBA predefined Ada support packages. Further, there are various feature tests.

The target language independent parser, CORBA::IDLtree, generates a tree representation of the IDL input code. Code generators act upon this tree.

License

The parser and code generators are distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The CORBA supporting Ada packages are distributed under the GNAT Modified GNU Public License (GMGPL).

Requirements

• A Unix box (I'm only testing on Linux so far. Mail me if you have success on other platforms.)
• perl 5 for GNACK's IDL compiler.
• GNAT, the GNU Ada compiler version 3.12p or later.
• glib >= 2.8, libIDL >= 0.8, these are required by ORBit2.
• ORBit2 - I am currently testing with version 2.14.

Status

2006-12-31: Basic conversion from ORBit1 to ORBit2 is complete and gnack-1.2 was released today.

Issuing CORBA calls from Ada tasks has not yet been extensively tested and testing is planned for the near future.

Major addition in GNACK version 1.0 was FATFIFI, Formatted Ada Text File I/O From IDL. The FATFIFI code generator produces the subprograms necessary for writing and reading IDL data structures using regular Ada.Text_IO. The data are written to text files in nicely formatted Ada syntax using named associations and appropriate indentation.
This is similar in spirit to Stephen Leake's Auto_Text_IO, only with IDL as the source definition language instead of Ada.

GNACK currently implements an extension of the June 1999 IDL to Ada mapping standard concerning server side skeletons. A POA_interface package is generated for each IDL interface, containing an Object type that acts as the parent of the Impl.Object type. This has the advantage of keeping the Impl package completely free of ORB internally required code. I hope to get around to updating this to the current Ada language mapping.

Further CORBA/Ada Info

If you are not bound to using ORBit then I recommend PolyORB, a free native Ada95 ORB.

Look here for info on CORBA to Ada mapping issues.

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This page is maintained by Oliver Kellogg. Any submissions by email welcome.