## Welcome to VBOrb

### About VBOrb

- VBOrb is an Object Request Broker.
- VBOrb is written entirely in Visual Basic 5.
- VBOrb comes with an IDL to VB compiler called IDL2VB. The compiler is written in Java.

With VBOrb you can write CORBA Visual Basic clients and servers. CORBA clients can call methods of remote objects written in any language and CORBA servers can call back methods of your local objects. For instance you can write your server in Java using a JavaORB and your client in VisualBasic using VBOrb. CORBA is an open standard in opposite of Microsoft DCOM or COM+. CORBA is specified by the OMG.

You can use VBOrb instead of a COM-CORBA-Brigde or to access EJBs (Enterprise Java Beans) or to remote control a Microsoft program by using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). Evaluate by yourself.

### VBOrb and IDL2VB sources

VBOrb is distributed by me under the `GNU Library General Public License'.
For the latest version of VBOrb and the IDL2VB compiler see http://home.t-online.de/home/Martin.Both/vborb.html.
For documentations study the READMEs of VBOrb in different directories and the examples in the demos directory.

### READMEs

Directory browser

### Programming hints

#pragma in IDL files, Exception handling

### VBOrb feature list

Additional I tell you what is not supported by VBOrb. Most ORB vendors didn't mention it although indeed they have missing features also.

- Reusable C preprocessor written in Java
- Reusable CORBA 2.4 compliant IDL compiler written in Java
- Support of wide strings (BOM, Codeset component in IOR, Codeset service context)
- Support of valuetypes, long long, exceptions, any (operation context and truncatable values are not supported)
- Support of corbaloc URL and corbaname URL
- Support of GIOP 1.2, fragments and old Visibroker workaround (bidirectional IIOP are not supported)
- Support of connection timeouts (POA and policies are not supported)
- Support of accessing EJB home and remote interfaces using RMI over IIOP, boxed Java arrays (see Java to IDL mapping specification) are mapped to Visual Basic sequences (Service context exceptions are still not supported)
- Quality: Some companies are using VBOrb in production areas
- Support of colocation (CORBA calls inside of applications)