Making Java^TM IDL and omniORB2 happy together -- a brief guide.

Java IDL is Sun's attempt at an ORB in Java, and manages to be significantly more stable than its pedigree might suggest. Many people seem to want to make it work with omniORB2, presumably because, like omniORB2, it's available gratis over the Internet. Unlike omniORB2, it doesn't come with any source code, but it's better than nothing.

For the most part, Java IDL and omniORB2 work quite happily together, as they ought to, given that that's the whole point of CORBA. There are a couple of problems, though:

• I think the following only applies to versions of omniORB prior to snapshot_971224

  The CosNaming stubs supplied with Java IDL are built from IDL with a '#pragma prefix "omg.org"' at the top, whereas omniNames' Naming.idl, for reasons I've not enquired about, doesn't have this. Thus, to make Java IDL work with omniNames, it's necessary to make some new stubs from the omniNames Naming.idl. In order to get the stubs in the right Java package, it's necessary to put '#pragma javaPackage "org.omg"' at the top of the file.

• Java IDL finds its name service using the bootstrap protocol described in Sun's Interoperable Naming Service specification. The Java IDL naming service includes a bootstrap server, but this isn't much use if you want resolve_initial_references to find an omniNames server. Eventually, after a bit of poking around, I found that this works:

  # java com.sun.CosNaming.BootstrapServer -InitialServicesFile filename

  where filename is the name of a file each of whose lines defines an initial service, with a name and a stringified IOR separated by spaces. This can be generated from an omniORB.cfg file using:

  $ sed -n 's/NAMESERVICE /NameService /p' < omniORB.cfg > filename

  If you're not root, or you trust Java about as far as you can throw it, you may want to add -ORBInitialPort n, where n is a convenient non-privileged port number. You'll have to use the same argument to all your other JavaIDL programs on the same machine.