Interoperability Tests
======================

In this directory are tests for interoperability between Fnorb and
other ORBs. The tests don't have to be as rigorous as the unit tests,
but they should at least cover all of the CORBA types.

The targeted ORBs are ORBacus, omniORB and TAO. There is a makefile
for each ORB. Maybe one day they could be merged into one makefile,
but for the time being the simplicity of separate makefiles wins out
until we identify all the build issues and invent a decent build
architecture that can handle them.

Status
======

So far only wide strings and characters are tested, as this is the
focus for this release. Being an "open source" project, we hope that
over time tests will be added as people diagnose and fix any issues
they run into.

Fnorb wstrings/wchars appear not to work with TAO. But, as you can
also use these tests to try the ORBs against one another, you can see
that no other ORBs work with it either. The client or the server will
fail. One might work, but not both.

This is because TAO *insists* on the BOM at the start of the wstring
for UTF-16, when the CORBA spec *clearly* states that when a BOM is
missing, the default is "big endian". I can't just add it all the
time, as ORBacus can't cope with this, either. So faced with the
choice between having ORBacus work some of the time, and TAO work some
of the time, and of having ORBacus work all of the time and TAO work
not at all, we have chosen to simply desupport TAO wstring
interoperability. If this is an issue, take it up with the TAO team.

To sum up, wstring/wchar support works with omniORB and ORBacus, but
not TAO due to a bug in TAO's wstring handling code.

It is also worth noting that TAO does not support the "fixed" type yet.
The rules for building these tests have been added to Makefile.tao,
but the fixedclient and fixedserver have not been added to the "all"
rule.