Related Work and References
The base material on CORBA can be found on the OMG Web site [1]. This includes OMG Formal Documentation [2], Recently Adopted Specifications and The Technical Committee Work in Progress [3] which offers up-to-date on-line information on the individual RFPs and their adoption process. One such RFP of a particular relevance for this Chapter, CORBA Components [4], has been recently posted by OMG in response to the Position Paper [5] by IBM, Netscape, Oracle and SunSoft, with mid November '97 as the first submission deadline. It is expected that this activity will result in JavaBeans based componentware model for CORBA.

Primary source of information on JavaBeans in the JavaSoft Web site [6]. See also the recent O'Reilly book by Robert Englander [7].

A good recent reference on Microsoft COM (Component Object Model) is Microsoft's Press book by Dale Rogerson [8].

CORBA/COM integration model is specified in the Core CORBA 2.1 document [9], Chapters 14 (Interworking), 15 (COM/CORBA mapping) and 16 (OLE Automation/CORBA mapping).

A good overview of CORBA/Java integration and the Object Web concepts can be found in the recent book Robert Orfali and Dan Harkey [10]. The two currently most popular commercial Java ORBs are: OrbixWeb by IONA [11] and VisiBroker for Java by Visigenic [12].

The first public domain ORBs became recently available such as JacORB [13] by University of Berlin, omniBroker by Olivetti and Oracle Labs [14] or Electra by Olsen & Associates [15]. These public domain ORBs facilitate several ongoing research projects on using CORBA for reliable distributed or/and high performance computing which we list below.

Nile, a National Challenge Computing Project [16] develops distributed computing solution for the CLEO High Energy Physics experiment using a self-managing, fault-tolerant, heterogeneous system of hundreds of commodity workstations, with access to a distributed database in excess of 100~TB. These resources are spread across the United States and Canada at 24 collaborating institutions. NILE is CORBA based and it uses Electra ORB.

Douglas Schmidt, Washington University, conducts research on high performance implementations of CORBA [17], geared towards real-time image processing and telemedicine applications on workstation clusters over ATM. His high performance ORB - TAO [18] - based on optimized version of public domain IIOP implementation from SunSoft outperforms commercial ORBs by factor 2-3.

Steve Vinoski, IONA and Douglas Schmidt address current R&D topics on the use of CORBA for distributed computing in their C++ Report column [19].

Richard Muntz, UCLA, explores the use of CORBA for building large scale object based data mining systems. His OASIS (Open Architecture Scientific Information System)[20] environment for scientific data analysis allows to store, retrieve, analyze and interpret selected datasets from a large collection of scientific information scattered across heterogeneous computational environments of Earth Science projects such as EOSDIS.

NPAC develops public domain Java based IIOP and HTTP server, WORB [21], with the alpha release planned by the end of '97 [21]

New anticipated developments in CORBA based distributed computing include emergent CORBAfacilities in specialized areas such as Workflow [22] or Distributed Simulations [23].

References
  1. Object Management Group, http://www.omg.org
  2. OMG Formal Documentation, http://www.omg.org/library/specindx.htm
  3. OMG TC Work in Progress, http://www.omg.org/library/schedule.htm
  4. "CORBA Component Model RFP", http://www.omg.org/library/schedule/CORBA_Component_Model_RFP.htm
  5. "CORBA Component Imperatives" - a position paper by IBM, Netscape, Oracle and SunSoft, http://www.omg.org/news/610pos.htm
  6. JavaBeans, http://www.javasoft.com/beans/
  7. "Developing JavaBeans" by Robert Englander, O'Reilly & Associates, June '97, ISBN: 1-56592-289-1.
  8. "Inside COM - Microsoft's Component Object Model" by Dale Rogerson, Microsoft Press, 1997, ISBN: 1-57231-349-8.
  9. CORBA 2.0/IIOP Specification, http://www.omg.org/corba/c2indx.htm
  10. "Client/Server Programming with Java and CORBA" by Robert Orfali and Dan Harkey, Wiley, Feb'97, ISBN: 0-471-16351-1
  11. OrbixWeb for Java from IONA, http://www.iona.com
  12. VisiBroker for Java from Visigenic, http://www.visigenic.com
  13. JacORB by Freie Universität Berlin, http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~brose/jacorb/
  14. omniORB2 by Olivetti and Oracle Research Laboratory http://www.orl.co.uk/omniORB/omniORB.html
  15. The Electra Object Request Broker, http://www.olsen.ch/~maffeis/electra.html
  16. Nile: National Challenge Computing Project http://www.nile.utexas.edu/
  17. "Research on High Performance and Real-Time CORBA" by Douglas Schmidt, http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/corba-research-overview.html
  18. "Real-time CORBA with TAO (The ACE ORB)" by Douglas Schmidt, http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html
  19. "Object Interconnections" by Steve Vinoski, column in C++ Report, http://www.iona.com/hyplan/vinoski/
  20. E. Mesrobian, R. Muntz, E. Shek, S. Nittel, M. LaRouche, and M. Krieger, "OASIS: An Open Architecture Scientific Information System," 6th International Workshop on Research Issues in Data Engineering, New Orleans, La. February, 1996, see also http://techinfo.jpl.nasa.gov/JPLTRS/SISN/ISSUE36/MUNTZ.htm
  21. WORB - Web Object Request Broker, http://osprey7.npac.syr.edu:1998/iwt98/projects/worb
  22. Workflow Mangement Coalition, http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/wfmc/
  23. High Level Architecture and Run-Time Infrastructure by DoD Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO), http://www.dmso.mil/hla