With the availability of industrial strength distributed object technology such as Orbix/CORBA, it seems natural to extend hush with the functionality needed to develop distributed CORBA-based hush components.
However, extending a given framework is not as straightforward as it may seem. First of all, one has to decide which interfaces may become public, that is may be exported as IDL interfaces. Secondly, one has to decide how object references become known to clients, and what rights clients have to create objects within a particular server. The most important problem, however, concerns the type clash between the CORBA classes implementing the IDL interfaces and the 'native' class hierarchy offered by the framework itself.
This paper gives an overview of the effort of extending hush with CORBA. In section 2, the various issues involved in extending a given framework or toolkit will be discussed in somewhat more detail. In section 3, the IDL interfaces for hush and the widgets will be described. In section 4, some examples are given of how to use hush in a CORBA environment. Finally, in section 5, we will discuss what further research is needed to make hush fully 'CORBA-compliant'.