IT-SC book: Advanced CORBA® Programming with C++

In a number of examples, we have made simple use of the Standard Template Library (STL). You should be able to follow these examples even if you do not yet know STL. (However, if you are not familiar with STL, we strongly suggest that you acquaint yourself with this library as soon as possible. STL has made a greater contribution to C++ programmer productivity than any other ISO/IEC C++ feature.)

We compiled and tested all of our example code against the next generation of the IONA Technologies Orbix product that, as of this writing, is still in development. This system, called ART, closely tracks ongoing changes to the CORBA specification and enabled us to verify our code against an ORB that conforms to the latest version (2.3) of the CORBA specification.

1.6 Vendor Dependencies

This book is free of vendor-dependent code and will work with any CORBA 2.3- compliant ORB (that is, an ORB that provides a POA). If your ORB vendor does not provide a POA yet, do not despair—much of this book is concerned with things other than the POA, and you will find a lot of material that is useful even if you are using a preCORBA 2.3 ORB.

We do not explain common, but vendor-specific, extensions to CORBA. Doing so would have distracted from the standards focus of the book and would have cluttered the presentation with proprietary material that is useful only to a subset of readers (and subject to change without warning). If you are interested in using proprietary extensions, you still need to read your vendor's documentation.

A number of aspects of CORBA, such as the development environment and implementation repositories, are not standardized at all. This makes it difficult to show concrete examples without choosing a specific vendor's implementation. In such cases, we show examples that use a hypothetical ORB and explain the principles in sufficient detail for you to be able to easily pick up the remaining details from your vendor's documentation.

1.7 Contacting the Authors

If you find any mistakes in the text or bugs in the code, we would like to hear from you. We would also like to hear from you if you have any other suggestions for improvement. If possible, we will integrate corrections and improvements in future printings and will acknowledge the first person to point out each particular correction or improvement. You can send e-mail to us at <http://corba@awl.com>.

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