Project status and research into WBEM and CORBA

For those tracking the Config4GNU project, you may have been disappointed in the past few months as there has been no news and very little traffic on the mailing list. This can mainly be attributed to the project leaders--Jason Long and Justin Yackoski--finishing their classes and graduating. Justin also got married in June (congratulations to him!) so that's been keeping him busy.

Meanwhile, I, Jason, have been focusing on doing some research into some new directions and ideas. A few weeks ago I announced on the mailing list my intention of looking into WBEM for configuration. WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management) is a set of standards for managing enterprise networks. After some initial difficulties, I did figure out how to write an OpenWBEM provider in C++. In addition, I feel like I'm starting to have some understanding of what WBEM can do for configuration, although I will not go into detail here.

More recently I've been experimenting with joining configuration tasks with CORBA. This requires writing some interface definitions for configuration tasks, and then implementing those interfaces for different types of configurations. Clients can be written in any language that has CORBA bindings, and they will be able to interact with configuration through the CORBA interfaces. This approach basically substitutes Config4GNU's current approach of passing XML representations between the client and the parsers.