Evaluating CORBA portability: the case of an object group service

Author

Felber, Pascal ; Guerraoui, Rachid ; Schiper, Andre

Author_Institution

Lab. of Oper. Syst., Fed. Inst. of Technol., Lausanne, Switzerland

fYear

1998

fDate

3-5 Nov 1998

Firstpage

164

Lastpage

173

Abstract

One of the most attractive aspects of the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) lies in its open standard nature. Code that is based only on constructs described in the CORBA specification is portable between object request brokers (ORBs) without depending on any single ORB implementation. However, this portability feature is not completely achieved in real-world applications. This paper discusses CORBA portability issues through our experience in implementing a CORBA object group service (OGS) and porting it on different ORBs. In particular, we discuss some implementation choices we made with Orbix and VisiBroker, and we point out the impact of these choices on the service portability and interoperability. This sheds some light on whether the current CORBA specification is mature enough to be deployed in industrial systems that have requirements regarding portability and interoperability. We also present how new CORBA specifications solve part of the shortcomings mentioned in this paper

Keywords

distributed object management; open systems; software portability; CORBA object group service; CORBA specification; Common Object Request Broker Architecture; Orbix; VisiBroker; code portability; implementation choices; industrial systems; interoperability; open standard; service portability; Buildings; Communication standards; Computer aided software engineering; Contracts; Electrical equipment industry; Laboratories; Large-scale systems; Middleware; Operating systems; Protocols;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop, 1998. EDOC '98. Proceedings. Second International

Conference_Location

La Jolla, CA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-5158-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/EDOC.1998.723252

Filename

723252