A CORBA event system for ALMA common software

The ALMA Common Software notification channel framework provides developers with an easy to use, high-performance, event-driven system supported across multiple programming languages and operating systems. It sits on top of the CORBA notification service and hides nearly all CORBA from developers. The system is based on a push event channel model where suppliers push events onto the channel and consumers process these asynchronously. This is a many-to-many publishing model whereby multiple suppliers send events to multiple consumers on the same channel. Furthermore, these event suppliers and consumers can be coded in C++, Java, or Python on any platform supported by ACS. There are only two classes developers need to be concerned with: SimpleSupplier and Consumer. SimpleSupplier was designed so that ALMA events (defined as IDL structures) could be published in the simplest manner possible without exposing any CORBA to the developer. Essentially all that needs to be known is the channel’s name and the IDL structure being published. The API takes care of everything else. With the Consumer class, the developer is responsible for providing the channel’s name as well as associating event types with functions that will handle them