CORBA broker / proxy over HTTP or accessible via sockets (for PHP)?

Question

I'm looking at connecting an existing PHP codebase to a remote CORBA service. All actual data is passed via XML so I don't think I need an IDL to PHP mapping for remote invocation. I just need to connect to the CORBA service, transmit to it the XML string, and read the XML response.

After some research on this I found the CORBA4PHP PHP extension which I'm about to try although am having some reservations (last updated in 2009). I also found numerous implementations in Java and Python.

To avoid dealing with a new PHP extension I'm wondering if there exists a CORBA HTTP proxy of sorts in any language that would take care of communicating with the CORBA service. I would HTTP POST to the proxy (or some socket communication), it would relay it to the CORBA service, and relay back to me its response.

Does such a proxy exist?

Answer 1

I don't know of such a service, but perhaps others might know of one. That said, given how simple your IDL is, I would just go ahead and try the CORBA4PHP extension and use that if it works.

If it doesn't work (I've no idea about its quality), it would be really simple to build such a proxy yourself:

1. Download a free ORB (let's say you get one for Java, say JacORB)
2. Compile your IDL and build a client to the CORBA service
3. Add a front-end API to your Java application which your PHP code will use to call it and pass in the string parameter containing your XML (POST sounds reasonable, and there are plenty of ways to implement such a thing in Java)