[Biocorba-l] Python client for 0.2 + EMBL questions

[Brad Chapman]

Hello all;
I've been coding up a python client implementation for the Alan's 0.2
idl proposal, using the EMBL server Alan set up as the server. So far, 
things are going smoothly and the interfaces seem very nice, I'm
really looking forward to moving my code over to using them. However,
I'm getting stuck on one problem with the server:

When I call SeqFeature::sub_SeqFeatures(), the server seems to be
hanging and never returning. The call seems to go out without a
problem, but I never get a return (at least not after a minute or so
of waiting for it) back to the client. Has anyone else been using the
server and have any ideas? Right now I can't seen anything in my code 
that is causing it (I have isolated the problem to the single call
which requests the SeqFeatureVector), but if the server works right 
on this function for  other people, then I can investigate further 
with different CORBA clients (right now I'm using omniORB). 
Any thoughts on this?

I also had one thought while I was working on things:

* Can optional implementation like size() and elementAt() return a 
error that indicates they don't implement these functions. This way 
it is easy to catch the error on the client side and know why you 
are getting  an error. I think this is clearer then returning None
if something is not implemented (like the EMBL server -- which returns 
None if you ask for a PrimarySeqVector()).
My preference would be to add a new exception "NotImplemented" that 
is raised in these cases.
What do people think about this?

Hope everyone had a good New Year and everything. I hope to have all
of this ready for people to use if they are interested really soon. 

Brad