WWW: Beyond the Basics

20 Common Object Request broker Architecture (CORBA)

20.3 OMG and CORBA

20.3.1 Object Management Group (OMG)

OMG is an industry consortium that includes over 500 members representing the entire spectrum of computer industry. These members are information system vendors, users and academic institutions. Most major computer companies like Sun, IBM, DEC, HP, etc. are members of OMG. The notable exception is Microsoft, which has its own competing object bus called the Common Object Model (COM). The goal of OMG is to bring together object technology and distributed computing. Its primary objective is to create a truly open object infrastructure and the result is the architecture for distributed components called the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA).

20.3.2 What is CORBA?

CORBA is the standard that defines a higher level facility for distributed objects architecture. CORBA uses objects as a unifying metaphor for bringing together existing applications, while at the same time providing a solid foundation for component based future. CORBA is self-describing and separates the implementation details from the client objects.

CORBA was basically designed to allow objects to discover each other and invoke methods on remote objects and interoperate on the object bus. It also provides facilities for bus related services like creating and deleting objects, accessing them by object IDs and storing them in databases. CORBA allows creation of an ordinary object and lets multiple inheritance acquire all the necessary features required to perform a specific function. This implies that we can design an ordinary component to provide its regular function and then insert the right middleware mix at compile time or run time to do certain functionality through objects, possibly on some remote server. So basically it provides benefits for distributed objects similar to Object-Oriented languages for non-distributed programming. It also hides all the low level details of distributed computing like traditional TCP byte-streams. It simplifies application interworking and provides the foundation for higher level distributed object collaboration.

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Padmapriya Vasudevan priya@csgrad.cs.vt.edu
Last modified: Sun Sep 22 21:16:15 1996