CORBA

Standard for distributed computing

 Middleware Systems

It enables interprocess communication

Provides the illusion of unity and homogen

Types
Transaction oriented- supports database a
Message oriented - Reliable & asynchro
Object oriented - Synchronous
CORBA
Common Object Request Broker
Architecture
CORBA has been defined by the
Object Management Group
middleware to manage
communications between distributed
objects
It follows RPC mechanism allowing
the invocation of operation across
the network
ARCHITECTURE
Application objects
They are application-specific, and
because the OMG does not develop
applications (only specifications),
these interfaces are not standardized.
Domain facilities
Orientedtowards specific application
domains. For example, one of the first
OMG Domain Interfaces is for Product
Data Management (PDM) Enablers for
the manufacturing domain.
Horizontal Corba facilities
They are oriented towards end-user
applications. An example of such a
facility is the Distributed Document
Component Facility (DDCF),i.e.
OpenDoc
CORBA services
Naming and trading services
These allow objects to discover and
refer to other objects on the network
Notification services
These allow objects to notify other
objects that an event has occurred
Transaction services
These support atomic transactions
and rollback on failure
Object Request Broker
The ORB handles object communications
It knows of all objects in the system and
their interfaces
Using an ORB, the calling object binds an
IDL stub that defines the interface of the
called object
Calling this stub results in calls to the
ORB which then calls the required object
through a published IDL skeleton that
links the interface to the service
implementation
O

ORB Object basedcommunication

ORB Structure
TERMS

Object - This is a CORBA programming entity that

consists of an identity, an interface, and an
implementation
Client -- This is the program entity that invokes an
operation on an object implementation.
Servant -- This is an implementation programming
language entity that defines the operations that
support a CORBA IDL interface
ORB -- When a client invokes an operation, the ORB
is responsible for finding the object implementation,
transparently activating it if necessary, delivering the
request to the object, and returning any response to
the caller
CORBA IDL stubs and skeletons -- CORBA IDL
stubs and skeletons serve as the ``glue'' between the
client and server applications respectively
TERMS

Object Adapter-- This assists the ORB with

delivering requests to the object and with activating
the object

Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII) -- This

interface allows a client to directly access the
underlying request mechanisms provided by an ORB

Dynamic Skeleton Interface (DSI) -- This is the

server side's analogue to the client side's DII. The DSI
allows an ORB to deliver requests to an object
implementation that does not have compile-time
knowledge of the type of the object it is implementing
Benefits
Language independence
OS-independence
Data-typing independence
High tunability
Compression- marshals data in binary forms
Criticisms
Since it was defined only with IDL initial
implementation work is difficult
It suffers from location transparency
Costly to implement
Firewall