Preface

Product

Lispworks Ltd's Common Lisp Object Request Broker™ (ORB™) supports the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA®) defined by Object Management Group®, Inc. (OMG™).

The LispWorks ORB and supporting tools provide CORBA architecture functionality to Common Lisp programmers, combining standardized distributed system development with a state-of-the-art dynamic object-oriented language.

Parts

The CORBA components included in The LispWorks ORB are:

1. Several fasls that are placed in the library directory, and which may be required into the image:

   corba-support	The client side of the ORB run time system plus the IDL parser.
   corba-orb	The server side, the actual LispWorks ORB, which loads corba-support if it is not present.
   corba-tools	Graphical tools.
   corba	Convenience module which simply requires corba-orb and corba-tools.

2. Some example Common Lisp code including:

   (example-edit-file "corba/hello-world/")
   

   (example-edit-file "corba/bank/")
   

3. This manual.

Audience

This manual is intended for use by application programmers who wish to build CORBA applications using Common Lisp. The guide assumes that the reader is familiar with both the Common Lisp programming language and with building distributed applications using CORBA.

Standards compliance

The LispWorks ORB conforms to the CORBA 2.0 specification with some elements of CORBA 2.2, most notably the Portable Object Adapter (POA).

Further reading

Many resources exist for those who want to learn about CORBA and distributed software development. The OMG maintains a great starting point for beginners at:

http://www.omg.org/gettingstarted

(This address may change.)

See also:

• Related books and magazines like:

  Instant CORBA by R. Orfali
  Published by John Wiley & Sons, 1997
  ISBN 0-471-18333-4.

• And mailing lists like CORBA Development:

  corba-dev@randomwalk.com
  

  This list discusses building CORBA-based systems. To subscribe, send email to corba-dev-request@randomwalk.com with
  subscribe corba-dev in the body of the message.

Viewing example files

This manual sometimes refers to example files in the LispWorks library via a Lisp form like this:

(example-edit-file "corba/hello-world/hello-world-client")

This examples is a Lisp source file in your LispWorks installation under lib/8-0-0-0/examples/. You can simply evaluate the given form to view the file.

Example files contain instructions about how to use them at the start of the file.

The examples files are in a read-only directory and therefore you should compile them inside the IDE (by the Editor command Compile Buffer or the toolbar button or by choosing Buffer > Compile from the context menu), so it does not try to write a fasl file.

If you want to manipulate an example file or compile it on the disk rather than in the IDE, then you need first to copy the file elsewhere (most easily by using the Editor command Write File or by choosing File > Save As from the context menu).