WWW: Beyond the Basics

20. Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)

by Padmapriya Vasudevan

ABSTRACT

Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is an industry standard that defines a higher level facility for distributed computing. CORBA is proposed by Object Management Group (OMG), an industry consortium whose mission is to create a truly open object infrastructure. CORBA allows applications to communicate with one another without being aware of the hardware or software systems or the location of the application. A client can transparently invoke a method on a server object. The objectcan be on the same machine or on a remote machine on the network using the middleware, Object Request Broker (ORB). The ORB intercepts the call, finds an object that can implement the request, invokes its method passing the required parameters and returns the results to the client. Thus, ORB provides interoperability between applications on different machines in heterogeneous distributed environments and brings together multiple object systems. The basis for interoperability comes from Interface Definition Language (IDL). It is a technology independent syntax for describing object encapsulations. IDL is declarative i.e., it provides no implementation details. IDL specified methods can be written and invoked from any language that provides CORBA bindings. Programmers deal with CORBA objects using native language constructs. IDL provides operating system and programming language
independent interfaces to all the services and components that reside on CORBA. In this chapter we provide a detailed discussion about CORBA.

CHAPTER CONTENT

  1. Introduction
  2. Component
    1. Objects
    2. Distributed Objects
    3. Components
  3. OMG and CORBA
    1. Object Management Group (OMG)
    2. What is CORBA?
  4. Object Request Broker
  5. Structure of CORBA 2.0
    1. Component on the Client Side
    2. Component on the Server Side
  6. Interface Definition Language
    1. Structure of IDL
    2. Example of IDL
  7. Object Adapter
  8. Static vs Dynamic Method Invocations
    1. Benefits of Static Method Invocation
    2. Benefits of Dynamic Method Invocation
  9. Static Method Invocation - A Step by Step Guide
  10. Dynamic Method Invocation - A Step by Step Guide
  11. Inter - ORB Architecture
    1. General Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP)
    2. Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP)
  12. WWW and CORBA
  13. Limitations of CORBA
  14. Summary
  15. References

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Copyright © 1996 Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
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Padmapriya Vasudevan priya@csgrad.cs.vt.edu
Last modified: Sun Sep 22 21:16:15 1996