I’m currently working on Igalia in order to get Fisterra better.
My firsts tasks was about obtain a good debian package for Fisterra, and then add documentation to the page. A good amount of developer manuals, installation manuals, and examples are important to understand a huge project, and Fisterra is a really huge one. This is important too to get a good comunity of people working on it (we are searching help, join us! 🙂 )
But recently, in a conversation with Alex, another Igalo, introduce me one technology: Internet Communications Engine, or sortly, Ice. Ice pretends to be a middleware similar to CORBA or COM. This was developed by ZeroC, a company founded by experienced CORBA developers. The idea is get a better middleware than CORBA. As ZeroC says, “we neither wish to start a “CORBA vs. Ice” flame war nor do we want to discredit CORBA. On the contrary, we believe that CORBA was a great achievement for its time, and obviously Ice borrows many good ideas from CORBA”. They only want to go to the next step.
I see the page and the features only a bit, but this looks great! And this was implemented by them himself, are complete, and are free (libre), using a GPL license.
Fisterra initially uses CORBA as the middleware for his communication layer, using the ORBit implementation. Then, adds support to SOAP, due some needs in a concrete project. And, what about uses Ice in Fisterra? This is a very interesting technology, and Fisterra was designed in a way that the comunication layer could be replace (this is a hard work, but not an IMPOSIBLE work), although the first task should be “it worth the effort?”. The next could be “we can use the three simultaneously?”.
This task could be called “Freeze Fisterra” … a good name 😉