WWW: Beyond the Basics

20 Common Object Request broker Architecture (CORBA)

20.4 Object Request Broker

An object request broker (ORB) is the central component of CORBA. It is the middleware that establishes client-server relationships between objects. Using an ORB the client can transparently invoke a method on a server object. The server object can be on the same machine or on a remote machine in a network. The ORB intercepts the call and is responsible for finding an object that can implement the request, pass the parameters, invoke the method and finally return the results computed to the server. The client need not know any details about the object like the location of the object, the programming language in which it is implemented, the operating system in which it executes on or the platform in which it exists. The client server relationship is applicable for any particular application. Objects on ORB can act as either client or server depending on the occasion.

The following are the features of CORBA ORB:

  • Polymorphic messaging ORB can invoke a method call corresponding to a specific server object. Thus, more than one server object can have the same method name. This means that the same function call may have different effects depending on the object that receives it.
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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