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PythonCom equivalent on Linux!

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.org.uk
Tue Oct 12 09:48:30 EDT 2004 
Ville Vainio <ville at spammers.com> wrote in message news:<du7hdp0qv7s.fsf at lehtori.cc.tut.fi>...
> >>>>> "john" == John  <johng2001 at rediffmail.com> writes:
> 
>     john> Is there an equivalent of COM on Linux that I can get
>     john> through Python.
> 
> Mono appears to be the future of COM equivalent technologies on
> Linux. Python support just isn't stable/mature there yet.

It depends what everyone means by "COM equivalent". If you mean it as
some kind of distributed object technology, then there are a lot of
CORBA-related solutions out there: ORBit (PyORBit vs. ORBit-python),
Fnorb, omniORB (omniORBpy), and so on. In addition, you have a
selection of unstandardised technologies to choose from, too.

> There is also xpcom.

As well as UNO (PyUNO), but that is arguably in the realm of the other
principal interpretation of "COM equivalent": the application
automation technology. On that front, there's ORBit and Bonobo for
GNOME-based applications (I believe) and DCOP for KDE-based
applications. Eventually, there'll be standardisation of such
technologies, and I imagine that D-BUS fits in somewhere here.

>     john> My need is to have some sort of language independent
>     john> component framework. I can think of CORBA but I have to have
>     john> a server running. I
> 
> How critical is this criterion? I would definitely go with CORBA.

Yes. Years ago I had a lot of fun with ILU, but I imagine that any of
the more mature/supported Python-compatible ORBs would be suitable.
Certainly, omniORB (http://omniorb.sourceforge.net/) would be my first
consideration.

Meanwhile, beware of suggestions that you use SOAP or XML-RPC! If
remote method calling is what interests you, such technologies are not
*directly* applicable (unless, in the case of SOAP, XML documents are
the primary representation of data in your system).

Paul
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