Title :
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
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;
Conference_Titel :
Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop, 1998. EDOC '98. Proceedings. Second International
Conference_Location :
La Jolla, CA
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-5158-4
DOI :
10.1109/EDOC.1998.723252
