I just found this thread, and thought I should add some recent developments.
First, Florian is right: the two ORBs are separated for historical reasons.
The reason for this is that it takes a long time to release a new ORB
in the JDK, and during that time, we are developing enterprise features
for the ORB in the app server. This makes it very difficult to get to the
point where we can rely on the ORB in the JDK, and even if we could,
there are problems with getting to an app server that requires a particular
release of the JDK as a minimum level. That said, I'd like to sync up
the ORB in JDK 7 with the current GlassFish ORB at some point.
If I can get to that, we will eventually be able to make the footprint
of downloaded apps smaller when the client is running on JDK 7.
Second, our next ORB integration will include a couple of changes of
interest to this discussion. First, I've moved all of the dynamic stub
generation off of BCEL and on to the codegen library, which uses ASM
for generating bytecode at runtime. This means that a future integration
(NOT the one coming next week) will remove the ORB's copy of BCEL,
which will reduce the ORB footprint by around 600K. I also need to
look at some other areas (e.g. activation and pcosnaming) that are
not needed, and perhaps reduce the footprint even further.
I'll post this, and then post another discussion about retries.
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