Date:         Mon, 25 Mar 2002 10:53:02 -0500
Reply-To:     "David L. Ward" <dward@SASHELP.COM>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
From:         "David L. Ward" <dward@SASHELP.COM>
Subject:      Re: Calling a Java Application from SAS within a data step and
              returning to SAS
Comments: To: Peter Crawford <peter.crawford@DB.COM>
In-Reply-To:  <OF96EC40A9.38055A11-ON41256B87.004FFFE8@db.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

After posting the skeleton code for a request server, I did a little bit of
reading on Java components.  Java has good support for something called
CORBA (http://www.omg.org/gettingstarted/corbafaq.htm), a framework for
separate applications or programming languages to communicate in a
meaningful way.  Something called IDL
(http://www.omg.org/gettingstarted/omg_idl.htm) is the language
specification that describes how a software language can implement CORBA.
If anyone on the list has had experience with CORBA and knows more than I do
about it, do you think it's feasible to write an interface to CORBA from
within the data step (either via SAS/Toolkit and C or through SAS code
directly via sockets or some other method)?  If so, this would open up a
world of usefulness within the data step - one could call other methods in a
variety of languages (perl, python, java, c, etc.) without the need for
SAS/Toolkit or SAS/AF.

Thanks for any ideas!

David Ward