omniORBpy 2.3 (November 2003) ============= This is omniORBpy 2, a robust high-performance CORBA ORB for Python. The bindings adhere to the standard IDL to Python mapping which you may find at http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/python_language_mapping.htm omniORBpy makes use of the C++ omniORB library. omniORBpy version 2.x can only be used with omniORB 4.0.x. omniORBpy is currently available for many Unix platforms and Windows. It has been ported to a number of other operating systems by outside contributors. It is a good idea to subscribe to the omniORB mailing list. See http://omniorb.sourceforge.net/list.html Please report any bugs you find to the mailing list. Building -------- If you are using a Unix platform, the Autoconf configure script will probably work for you. Simply create a directory for the build and run the configure script, followed by make: $ cd [omniORBpy directory] $ mkdir build $ cd build $ ../configure [configure options] $ make $ make install Run configure --help to get a list of configuration options. Most options are standard Autoconf ones. The most commonly required is --prefix, used to select the install location. The default is /usr/local. To change it, use, for example ../configure --prefix=/home/fred/omni_inst If you use a different prefix to the omniORB install, you must give the location to omniORB with the --with-omniorb= option. The configure script tries to figure out the location of the C and C++ compilers and Python. It will always choose gcc over the platform's native compiler if it is available. To change the choices it makes, use variables CC, CXX and PYTHON, e.g.: ../configure CXX=/usr/bin/platform_c++ PYTHON=/usr/local/bin/python2.3 If you do not have Autoconf support on your platform, you must install the omniORBpy source in the $TOP/src/lib directory of a working omniORB 4.0 tree. Then, in the $TOP/src/lib/omniORBpy directory, simply do a gnumake export. Using omniORBpy --------------- To use omniORBpy, you need to add the directories containing omniORB to your PYTHONPATH. With an Autoconf build, if you specified the same installation prefix as was used for Python, you do not need to add anything to PYTHONPATH; if you used a different installation prefix, add this path: export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$PREFIX/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages replacing pythonX.Y with the version of Python you are using, e.g. python2.2 With the non Autoconf build, you must add two directories to PYTHONPATH: export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:$TOP/lib/python:$TOP/lib/$FARCH where $TOP is the root of your omniORB tree and $FARCH is the platform name you selected in config.mk. Windows uses semicolons instead of colons to separate path components: set PYTHONPATH=%PYTHONPATH%;%TOP%\lib\python;%TOP%\lib\x86_win32 You should also have the correct bin directory on your path so you can run the IDL compiler, omniidl. With Autoconf builds, it is in $PREFIX/bin ; otherwise it is in $TOP/bin/$FARCH. Full documentation, in a variety of formats, can be found in the doc directory. Missing features ---------------- The following features are currently missing from omniORBpy. 1. There is no support for DII and DSI. Since you can write IDL and Python code on-the-fly, this is not a significant limitation. 2. Objects by value are not supported.