Component based distributed systems – CORBA and EJB in context Original Research Article

Astronomy, like other sciences, is highly collaborative, so it is no surprise that astronomical computing environments have become increasingly distributed in nature. Therefore the interest in benefiting from new developments in distributed computing technologies is clear, but to reap these potential benefits we must overcome the problems posed by the heterogeneous mix of different architectures and operating systems that occur. This mix has made information flow between systems at best difficult and organizations have not been able to fully harness one of their most valuable assets, namely information. This paper introduces the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) and Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), and puts forward a rationale as to why they have the potential to provide the required integration platform. These component based distributed technologies, allow disparate, heterogeneous legacy data systems to be integrated with current systems and they also support the incremental growth of current systems to meet evolving requirements.