Purely coincidentally at almost the same time that Dai announced server-side support for Ruby, I've just finished the alpha release of my own ORBit bindings for Ruby. Only the client-side bindings are included in this release, but server-side bindings are being debugged and should be ready in a few weeks. All basic and user-defined IDL types are supported, including TypeCode and Any. Most of the standard ORB and CORBA::Object operations are supported as well. The DII is not supported since it is really unnecessary given the dynamic nature of both Ruby and these bindings. Why two ORBit bindings, you ask? Well, first, when I began this project, Dai had stopped work on ruby-orbit for over a year, and it was not clear when he was going to resume. Second, our approaches are quite different. My bindings do not require any intermediate IDL compilation step. After all, Ruby is a dynamic language, so why not take advantage of that fact? With these bindings, if you want to use a top-level module called "Foo" in some IDL file, you can just say "require 'Foo'" at the top of your script, and the IDL file will be located, parsed, and used to create Ruby types corresponding to all IDL definitions in the file. The IDL file merely needs to be in a standard location: the current directory, one of several hardcoded directories (/usr/share/idl etc.), or a directory listed in the environment variable IDLPATH. (Otherwise, you can always specify the file's location explicitly using CORBA._load_idl.) This should make CORBA prototyping with Ruby much more rapid and painless. I have tried to document the IDL-Ruby mapping I have used as thoroughly as possible in the README. Unfortunately, there hasn't been enough English-language documentation available for ruby-orbit or rinn to ensure compatibility with Dai's mapping. But I think that as people start to use both our bindings, we'll eventually be able to come to a consensus on a standard IDL-Ruby mapping. Enjoy, and please email me any suggestions or bug reports! Oh yeah, you can grab the tarball at http://www.geocities.com/malyce4all/corba.tar.gz