Communications of the ACM
Using Tcl to script CORBA interactions in a distributed system
TCLTK'98 Proceedings of the 6th conference on Annual Tcl/Tk Workshop, 1998 - Volume 6
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A large Swiss bank needed to collect, combine, process, and distribute financial market data from various 3rd party data sources to a large number of internal and external clients - the typical integration task at which scripting languages excel. The bank uses an implementation of CORBA as their standard enterprise-wide middleware for distributed applications. We describe how we designed and built a Tcl/C++ transport framework which allowed us to develop the "kernel" of this server application entirely in Tcl, yet support CORBA as the primary interface to the server. We further describe how this framework allows a small development team to rapidly implement changes and enhancements to the server and its external interface, while automatically generating the corresponding changes that are needed for the CORBA interface. Additionally, we show how we were able to automatically generate code to create new tcl commands that make use of the same, generated, Tcl/C++ marshalling routines in order to develop a CORBA client in Tcl, which is used to regression test the server, when full end-to-end testing is needed.