Hi Nathan,
On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, Nathan C Summers wrote:
> Having plug-ins available to run on other hosts would be nice. Think
> a gimp farm. CORBA would seem to be an ideal solution to all of these
> issues. Can CORBA handle the large amounts of data transfer gimp
> requires at least as efficiently as the gimp protocol does?
I don't know what the gimp protocol is - clearly for _massive_
chunks of data, shared memory is the only way to go. Vladimir has a nice
CORBA interface for dealing with setting up shmem chunks to do this I
think for his video editing toy.
The IIOP protocol is ( to my mind ) very efficient, I don't know
how efficient the gimp protocol is but here are some details:
* endianness aware - endianness is passed as a flag on the message
to avoid redundant swapping
* alignment is per type, char - 0 -> double - 8, binary encoding
on the wire - ie. just dump the &variable ( aligned right ) to the
wire.
* strings, sequences have an associated 32bit length
* sequence<octet> allows big chunks of data to be transfered with
only a long length being associated.
What else can I say - it's pretty efficient. No hint of slow ->
xml type translation in the way. It is a nice protocol.
HTH,
Michael.
--
mmeeks@xxxxxxx <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
