Java Distributed Computing

CORBA

CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Adapter, is a distributed object standard developed by members of the Object Management Group (OMG) and their corporate members and sponsors. The first versions of the CORBA standard were developed long before Java was publicized by Sun (the OMG was formed in 1989, the CORBA 1.1 specification was released in 1991, and the first pre-release versions of Java and the HotJava browser were made public in the 1994-1995 timeframe). CORBA is meant to be a generic framework for building systems involving distributed objects. The framework is meant to be platform- and language-independent, in the sense that client stub interfaces to the objects, and the server implementations of these object interfaces, can be specified in any programming language. The stubs and skeletons for the objects must conform to the specifications of the CORBA standard in order for any CORBA client to access your CORBA objects.

The CORBA framework for distributing objects consists of the following elements:

• An Object Request Broker (ORB), which provides clients and servers of distributed objects with the means to make and receive requests of each other. ORBs can also provide object services, such as a Naming Service that lets clients look-up objects by name, or Security Services that provide for secure inter-object communications.

• Methods for specifying the interfaces that objects in the system support. These interfaces specify the operations that can be requested of ...