A mechanism to provide interoperability between ORBs with relocation transparency

The ability of heterogeneous systems to cooperate in problem solving is a real necessity that has been growing due to the increasing development of distributed processing technology. This necessity is driving the development of more suitable solutions. The CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) specification presents an architecture which allows interoperability among heterogeneous distributed environment applications. However, because of the great flexibility offered in implementation decisions, many problems arise in attempting to extend interoperability between two ORBs developed by different technologies. This paper discusses these problems and their solutions and presents a set of operations to support a bridging mechanism extending access and location transparencies (which are considered fundamental for a distributed environment) to work beyond an ORB scope. A scheme to provide relocation transparency, extended to support interoperability, is also proposed. Finally, an implementation of these mechanisms over an ORB prototype, developed at UNICAMP, and ORBeline (a commercial product) is described