[zeromq-dev] ZeroMQ as replacement for CORBA in robotics

[Christoph Mueller]

Hi folks :)

I've worked 4 years in an institute for robotics where CORBA is still a 
big thing for handling a highly-concurrent and distributed dataflow 
network located on different machines/platforms and with a high-spread 
of different implemenation languages (C, C++, Python, Ruby). It was 
often a pain in the ass how the software architecture envolved into 
complexer shape from year to year.

Now i've found your amazing piece of software in the last days and your 
framework have left a fabulous impression on me. Especially the 
documentation seems really great, seems to provide a nice interface to 
complex network stuff and i'm wondering if ZeroMQ could be the modern 
alternative of CORBA for the future.

1) I would like to ask you if you have any experiences/userstories/works 
where ZeroMQ is currently used in robotics and how does it fit thier 
requirements? I'm just curious how does it perform in such domain :)

2) I've started for myself a research project on zeromq that should be 
used for an IPC layer (TCP, PF_UNIX) to handle an asynchronous data 
network to connect a webcam process with an independent interface to 
other proccessors (loggers, computer vision detectors, gui 
visualization) I'm intending to use a classical named input/output-port 
architecture with specified messages (by google's protocul buffers) that 
is also known in ROS/Orocos (which also uses data-oriented 
publish/subscribe architecture)

Do you have any hints and handy tips about important topics in ZeroMQ 
which are helpfull in implementing this ideaand
i could focus in the beginning? That would be awesome.


Hope these questions are not to wide opened for a discussion.

I also want to give the developers my appreciation for this nice 
engineered framework. Looks very solid and developer-friendly :] Keep up 
working it that manner.

Best Regards
Ruuns