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CORBA for Fourth Generation Languages--Tech-X Corporation, 5541 Central Avenue, Suite 135, Boulder, CO  80301; 303-448-0727

Dr Svetlana G. Shasharina, Principal Investigator

Dr. John R. Cary, Business Official

DOE Grant No. DE-FG03-00ER83107

Amount:  $99,967

 

The emerging standard for object based networking is the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).  However, CORBA is not readily available for 4GL’s such as Visual Numerics’ PVWave or Research Systems’ Interactive Data Language, which are widely used by scientists and engineers for data visualization.  The proposed work would provide a set of tools for importing CORBA servers into 4GL’s.  The problem would be addressed by the development of software that would take as its input the Interface Definition Language (CORBA-IDL) files and result in the wrapper functions that are needed to import CORBA objects into 4GL’s.  The software toolkit would work across multiple platforms, including the major UNIX variants as well as Windows and Windows NT, and multiple compilers, with plugins generated for the Integrated Development Environments (IDE’s) that come with the various compilers.  In addition a user friendly tool to generate appropriate wrapper code would be provided.  In Phase I several existing methods for wrapping C and C++ code to enable it to be inserted into scripting languages like Perl and Python would be analyzed.  Preliminary implementations based writing front ends and back ends for these tools would be completed.

 

Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee:  Such tools could be licensed to the commercial firms currently providing 4GL’s.  These firms include RSI, AVS, and Visual Numerics.  Additionally, follow-up consulting work to assist in the use of these tools is part of the commercialization plan.