RE: (FC-Devel) requirements

["Ross, Brenton" <brenton.ross@transigo.net.au>]

Hi,

I've been watching the development of FreeCase with interest over the
last few months.  Mostly out of curiosity about how a large project of
this nature will unfold, but also because I think that the world of
software development needs a good CASE tool that anyone can afford.

On 6 Oct 1998, Jeff wrote

On the interfaces, we need to make some decisions.  My original
intention
was to develop an interface that used serialized objects and vanilla
TCP/IP.
Then, we could easily add secondary interfaces to allow bridging from
COM ,
CORBA, or whatever.  Does anyone have an opinion on this?

Over the last few years I have been involved in several large software
development projects that needed to serialise some quite complex
objects.  This has invariably turned out to be nontrivial, messy and
tedious to code by hand (or with hand built code generators).  The
learning curve for CORBA might seem a bit steep at first, but it will do
this stuff for you.

Another thing that you might like to consider is that IDL is a good
choice for *defining* the interfaces in your system, whether you then
use CORBA or not.  If there is one thing I have learnt over the last 15
years is that, after clearly stating the requirements, the most
important thing is to define the interfaces.  After that its all down
hill.

Brenton
Senior Software Engineer
Aspect Computing

[These views are entirely my own, though I hope that my employer shares
them]