[cap-talk] OCap CORBA, anyone? (was Re: POLA focus seen as counter productive)

[David Chizmadia (JHU)]

Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> I actually think the network area is a lost cause, because it is a
> solved problem. There is this thing called CORBA...

    Shap, don't bait the CORBA geek!! :-D

> Now CORBA isn't capabilities. It has no security story and so forth. But

    It has a security story (CSIv2), but the story sucks :-(

    ... especially in the context of embedded systems!!!

> it is close enough to the capability story that customers generally do
> not understand the difference. They do not perceive any operational
> *pain* from CORBA. When they do, they will evaluate compatibility costs
> and conclude that they can continue to use CORBA and handle security as
> a problem of increased engineering effort.
> 
>> Where do you see the most hope for progress?
> 
> Right where my company is pointed: critical embedded systems. For a
> variety of reasons, it is harder to delude yourself about the importance
> of strong engineering in these applications.
> 
> I think we have a shot at taking a position there. The question is: can
> we parlay it into a broader revenue stream? I guess we'll find out.

    As a long-time OMG security participant, I can assure you that
the people who are actually using CORBA for new development - i.e.,
the military-industrial complexes in the US and Europe  who are, in
fact, most interested in embedded systems) are very interested in a
credible, robust, and scalable network security story for CORBA. The
major constraint at this point is that at least 30% of the players
will assume that the underlying OS is based on the MILS architecture.

    I've actually been trying to figure out how to phrase a proposal
to this list to take an aggressive lead in reworking CORBA so that
it is more closely aligned with the Web Calculus (or whatever
petname it currently uses) - thanks Shap, for providing the opening.
A major advantage in this area is that one of the most respected
people in OMG (Jishnu Mukerji) represents HP, so it would be very
easy for HP Labs to insert itself into the dialogs.

    It also turns out that the last OMG meeting of this year (10-14
Dec) will be in Burlingame, CA. So it would be very local for many
of the object capability community's major players. The following
meeting is in Washington, DC.

    If there is any real interest in using OMG as a venue for public
specifications of OCapCORBA, I would be very willing to lobby for
time on the joint MARS (Middleware And Related Services) and
Real-time task force agendas.

    Another interesting opportunity is to start formalizing some of
the lessons learned in creating OCap dialects of legacy languages as
 a Platform-Independent Model of an OCap programming language
platform. This would then allow for (semi-)automatic code generation
based on OCap-based system models.

-DMC