Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: IDL interfaces for chess

Author: Frank Schneider

Date: 14:34:43 02/23/98

Go up one level in this thread


On February 23, 1998 at 11:42:11, Greg Manning wrote:

>Frank,
>
>I agree that "Interoperability between components"
>would be great for computer-chess users and reuse of
>design and code would be nice for chess programmers.
>
>At this point in history, it seems to me that using
>CORBA/IDL is a bit over-ambitious.
I agree that using CORBA would be ambitious at the moment. However,
defining interfaces takes some time and distributed object technology
(CORBA or DCOM) will become more commonly used until interfaces are
ready.

>A more modest goal would be
>a standard C/C++ API to chess engines and one free UI in Java.
If you define IDL-interfaces you still could publish the (generated)
C++-interfaces and use them as a C/C++-API without the drawback
of beeing C++-specific.

>aside: is interoperability in the interest of commercial developers?
Interesting question. My opinion was that they might be interesting for
commercial developers, but Matthias Wuellenweber disagreed.
I believe that there are components that will be better if developed by
commercial vendors (GUI, multimedia-things). I'm not sure if the average
user is likely to pay $100 for the best commercial engine, when there
are
lots of free engines that are strong enought (think about hardware in
2008).
If a vendor offers a nice GUI its value increases with the number of
engines available (see Fritz).

Frank



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.