Creating a WPS class

The WPS is based on SOM the System Object Model, an implementation of an ORB compatible with an older CORBA specification (remember SOM wasn't updated for quite a while). There's a lot of fuzz about how advanced the WPS is because it uses CORBA etc. bla bla. In fact most of the features of the WPS don't need a fully CORBA compliant ORB and more important don't use it. While Distributed SOM (DSOM) is coming with OS/2 the WPS seem to use only local SOM.

While it's possible to query, load, unload and replace SOM classes on demand during program execution the WPS usually builds its class tree during initialization. Thus class replacement requires a WPS restart. Note that adding of classes can still be done without a restart. Saying this that doesn't mean you never can replace a class during runtime. It's always possible to bend the borders with some serious hacking but there's no general API for that.

Writing a new WPS class is a three step process.

1. Write your class definition in the Interface Definition Language (IDL).
2. Compile the class definition using the SOM compiler.
3. Compile the source files emmited by the SOM compiler using your C compiler.

As can be seen there's no magic behind these steps and the only unusual part is creating the IDL file.