Engine Room CORBA
=================

This is a free version of CORBA for Win95/WinNT/Linux platforms although
it should work on any platform with a GNU C++ compiler or Java VM.

For licence details read the file licence.txt

To find out what's in the current release read release.txt

See the file ercorba.html for VERY bare bones documentation

Although it's free I never refuse money - so if you'd like to make
a contribution or sponsor futher work then my address is

    26 Newlands Road
    GLASGOW 
    G43 2JD
    Scotland.

My current home page contains the latest version at
    http://members.aol.com/MitchBritt

and my e-mail address is

    mitch_britton@email.com.

However, I may change this as I've had a lot of complaints 
about the availability of AOL's servers so I'll try and keep
an up-to-date version on Simtel.net

    http://www.simtel.net/simtel.net/mirrors.html


The product consists of

 1. an IDL compiler written in Java which can currently produce
    both client and server stubs for the 'C', C++ and Java programming languages.

 2. ORB and ORB agent source in C/C++

 3. Libraries, header files and JAR files to compile and link your own
    CORBA clients and servers.

This product requires a Java virtual machine and the Borland C/C++
or Visual C++ compiler. The JDK 1.1.6 was used to build the IDL compiler
and Borland C/C++ Version 5.002 was used to build and test the 'C' and C++ 
mapping. It was also tested with Visual C++ and GNU C on Linux.

HISTORY
=======

This project was in part inspired by the fact that CORBA is
expensive and partly due to a project I was on in Switzerland
for a year where there so many U turns and false starts
that I would have killed for a free version of CORBA
to port (in that case on MQSeries). So from now on I will always
have CORBA with me.

I did the 'C' language mapping first because

    1. 'C' is still very much the lingua franca of the UNIX and
        PC world although Java is catching up fast. Even many mainframes
        have access to 'C' compilers these days. Besides, Java has
        RMI for pure Java alternatives.

    2.  Anything written in 'C' can be accessed by C++ and it's not
        beyond the wit of man to write C++ wrappers if required.

    3.  I thought that the 'C' mapping would be the most difficult so
        I could get the major design errors out before tackling C++ and
        Java. I was wrong - Java was much more difficult.

