Yesterday I was setting up CORBA via SSL on JacORB and was surprised that despite seemingly good support this task can still be such a headache. We needed the single-port SSL connection that would be secure from beginning (no naming service on an unprotected port) and would not require to pass the lenghty server IOR address via some other channel (the example in JacORB uses a shared file system to pass the IOR and in addition is broken in 2.3.0 release). The corbaloc:ssliop address notation still seemed not supported, so the only hack around we were able to find was to patch the pre-generated IOR for the local host with the separately given IP address and SSL port. Thank goodness JacORB has the internal undocumented routines to parse and modify IOR's, same as the GNU Classpath does. It is really sad that these IOR manipulation routines are in the private space and may change dramatically between releases. Likely having the useable naming service via SSL connection without passing of the 2K IOR that must be known in advance should be very easy and trivial to do.

I know that people more talk about the web services in these days, but our "messages" are many megabytes in size even when they are binary. It is really great that I have a lot of things to remember from the GNU Classpath CORBA project - otherwise it would likely take days to figure everything out. Indeed, the company managers should look for the Free software developers to do they tasks ...