[jcifs] Re: Tridge's PIDL compiler and the Samba4 IDLs.

[Christopher R. Hertel]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 09:53:49PM -0400, Michael B Allen wrote:
> Eric Glass said:
> > Actually, *both* would probably be useful for Jarapac; as Chris noted,
> > the Samba folk have done a lot of stuff with PIDL that could be
> > leveraged with a backend generating Jarapac stubs.  Plus, it's pretty
> > much a given that they will continue prolifically expanding the
> > library of PIDL going forward.
> 
> I know you're taking the diplomatic position here but to be honest I
> actually doubt PIDL could be adjusted to generate good Java stubs. Not
> easily. You know there's actually some C code embedded in a few spots?

He's not being diplomatic, he's right.  The C code you're seeing is in one 
of the back-ends.  It's not fixed into the compiler.

> You
> could simply ignore that of course but what does it *do*? What you're
> really talking about is making PIDL languange agnostic which is a lot
> harder if you're starting with something that's somewhat Samba specific.

It was created based on Samba experience, but it's not that Samba
specific.  It's supposed to be usable by anyone.  That's one of the design 
goals.

> Not only would you have to adjust the code to be suitable for generating
> Java but you would have to also be concerned that it wouldn't break the C
> stubs. Then what about the next language?

Different back-ends.  That code is either isolated or should be.  If it's 
not isolated, then it's a bug that we'll be fixing.

> The attributes are inherited such that val will have attributes
> foo,bar,zap=3. You can generate stubs for any language with ~300 lines of
> code [2]. You have to really understand NDR well to write those 300 lines
> of code but once you do, that's it, you can generate stubs in that
> langauge for any input IDL [3].

Note:  We've found that not all RPCs are NDR encoded.  There's some new 
encoding that's started to show up.

Chris -)-----

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
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