Work · Quark Inc. · Denver · May 2000 – Mar 2005

Quark Mono / CORBA — remote control over the wire

Contributed to the Mono project) — Miguel de Icaza's open-source.NET implementation for non-Windows platforms — and used it as the substrate for a CORBA interface that remote-controlled QuarkXPress over the wire. Any host on any OS could drive QuarkXPress as if it were a local object — orthogonal companion to the in-process Virtual DOM, reaching across the network the same way the DOM reached across the application.

Era: Quark Inc. · Denver · within May 2000 – March 2005 · Software Engineer III
Substrate: Mono runtime · cross-platform C# / CLI · Mac OS X, Linux, Windows
Wire protocol: CORBA — OMG's Common Object Request Broker Architecture · the era's canonical inter-process / cross-language object protocol
What it controlled: QuarkXPress — full document and application surface accessible remotely with the same semantics as the in-process Virtual DOM
Lineage forward: The Mono / cross-platform C# substrate proven here is the ancestor of the C# substrate the Qualcomm test-automation rewrite landed on (2010s) and later Living-Codex-CSharp (2024) built on. C# enters this body's tooling here.

Why two faces of one app

The in-process Virtual DOM let scripts running inside QuarkXPress drive every part of it. The Mono / CORBA bridge let scripts running outside QuarkXPress — possibly on a different OS, possibly on a different machine — drive every part of it with the same semantics. Two faces of the same self-describing conviction: the application is its own API surface, and the wire transport is incidental to that.

Mono in the early 2000s

Mono) — launched by Miguel de Icaza around 2001 — was the open-source implementation of Microsoft's.NET Common Language Infrastructure for non-Windows platforms. Running C# code on Mac OS X or Linux in 2002 was bleeding edge. Contributing to Mono in those years meant tracking the published ECMA spec while it was still moving, finding gaps where the spec was ambiguous, and shipping the first cross-platform corrections that would later become baseline behavior.

For Quark, the bet on Mono was strategic. QuarkXPress shipped on both Mac and Windows. Tooling that wanted to drive it from either side without forking the code paths needed a runtime that ran on both. Mono was the only credible answer in 2003. C# was already a more ergonomic choice than C++ for tooling code; Mono made that choice portable.

Two layers each side of the wire, with the ORB carrying the calls between them:

IDL contract sits beneath both stubs and skeletons. The client speaks C# on Mono; the server speaks the QXP runtime; the ORB routes between them on the IIOP wire.

What the architecture committed to: one contract (the IDL), one wire protocol (IIOP), and a code generation step on each side. Adding a new client language meant generating its stubs from the same IDL — no QuarkXPress-side change. Adding a new exposed interface meant editing the IDL once — both sides regenerated. That's the same posture the Coherence Network 's API now takes with FastAPI's OpenAPI contract: the schema is the source of truth; clients derive from it. CORBA was that conviction expressed in the 2003 vocabulary.

Quark Mono / CORBA — remote control over the wire

Mono in the early 2000s

The architecture