Pure CORBA

GIOP: The Basis for IIOP

Because IIOP is actually a specialization of the General Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP), much of the behavior of IIOP is in fact inherited from the more general GIOP protocol specification. Thus it is appropriate to first discuss GIOP itself, after which the IIOP-specific specializations to GIOP can be discussed.

First, some history. The CORBA 1.1 specification published in late 1991 did not define enough of the low-level details that were necessary for one ORB to communicate effectively with another vendor’s ORB, leaving many details to be decided by the various implementing vendors. Different vendors therefore developed highly proprietary ways of communication, rendering their ORBs incompatible with each other. The details ...