Copyright (C) 1999-2019, Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option) any later version. This software is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License and a copy of the GCC Runtime Library Exception along with this program; see the files COPYING3 and COPYING.RUNTIME respectively. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
PolyORB is maintained by AdaCore (email: sales@adacore.com)
This is the README file for PolyORB.
The home page of the project is located at https://github.com/AdaCore/PolyORB/
PolyORB is a polymorphic, reusable infrastructure for building object-oriented distributed systems. Middleware environments are software libraries that hide the complex issues of distribution and provide the programmer with high-level abstractions that allow easy and transparent construction of distributed applications. A number of different standards exist for creating object-oriented distributed applications. These standards define two things:
- the interface seen by the developer's applicative objects;
- the protocol used by the middleware environment to talk to other nodes in the distributed application.
Usually, middleware for one platform supports only one set of such interfaces, and cannot interoperate with other platforms.
A polymorphic middleware allows the existence of several different implementations of each of these aspects to be used within the same middleware framework. In addition, PolyORB allows such different personalities to coexist in the same instance of the running middleware; it decouples the personality presented to applications on one side ("application personality"), and the personality presented to other middleware on the other side ("protocol personality"). Multiple implementations of each personalisable aspect can coexist within the same instance of the running middleware: unlike previous generic middleware, PolyORB is actually schizophrenic.
The decoupling of application and protocol personalities, and the support for multiple simultaneous personalities within the same running middleware are key features required for the construction of interoperable distributed applications. This allows PolyORB to communicate with middleware that implement different distribution standards: PolyORB provides middleware-to-middleware interoperability.
The PolyORB architecture also permits the automatic, just-in-time creation of proxies between incompatible environments (although this feature is not implemented yet).
PolyORB can be used in Ada 95 and Ada 2005 applications alike. It is implemented in Ada 2005 and C.
See INSTALL file for more details on supported platforms and installation process.
Documentation entry points can be found in the following files:
| Filename | Contents |
|---|---|
| README.md | This file, first instructions. |
| README.DSA | Additional information for Ada Distributed Systems Annex |
| INSTALL | Detail PolyORB installation process. |
| FEATURES | List PolyORB's features. |
| src/ROADMAP | Overview of PolyORB source code. |
| docs/ | Documents describing PolyORB internals, and sources for the PolyORB User's Guide. |
The PolyORB User's Guide is also available online at https://docs.adacore.com/polyorb-docs/html/ug_contents.html
We gladly accept problem reports and patches from the community. Please submit them through through Github issues and pull requests.
You can also seek community support through the public mailing list: polyorb-users@lists.adacore.com
Please include the complete output of "polyorb-config --version" in any problem report.
If you are interested in becoming a supported PolyORB user, you should send an email to sales@adacore.com.
The PoyORB testsuite uses GNATPython.
To use it:
git clone https://github.com/Nikokrock/gnatpython
Then install it in your python distribution (./setup.py install) or export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/gnatpython and compile gnatpython/src/rlimit/rlimit.c (or rlimit-NT.c if you are on a windows machine) and add it to your PATH.
See output of testsuite.py -h for instructions.
The mailing-list PolyORB-Users serves as a informal forum for technical discussions about PolyORB among users.
You can subscribe to this list and browse the archive at the URL:
http://lists.adacore.com/mailman/listinfo/polyorb-users
PolyORB has been developed since January, 1999 by the following contributors:
- Dmitriy Anisimkov
- Nicolas Archambault
- Fabien Azavant
- Benjamin Bagland
- Khaled Barbaria
- Nikolay Boshnakov
- Reto Buerki
- Emmanuel Chavane
- Karim Chine
- Jean-Marie Cottin
- Olivier Delalleau
- Cyril Domercq
- Robert Duff
- Michael Friess
- Nicolas Fritsch
- Jeremy Gibbons
- Vadim Godunko
- Jerome Guitton
- Jerome Hugues
- Mejdi Kaddour
- Oliver Kellogg
- Fabrice Kordon
- Narinder Kumar
- Laurent Kubler
- Stéphane Lanarre
- Lionel Litty
- Vincent Niebel
- Pascal Obry
- Pablo Oliveira
- Pierre Palatin
- Bertrand Paquet
- Laurent Pautet
- Sebastien Ponce
- Thomas Quinot
- Nicolas Roche
- Jerome Roussel
- Selvaratnam Senthuran
- Nicolas Setton
- Frank Singhoff
- Samuel Tardieu
- Santiago Urueña-Pascual
- Thomas Vergnaud
- Florian Villoing
- Guillaume Wisniewski
- Thomas Wolf
- Bechir Zalila