The CORBA connection

Abstract

ORBA onnection KRISHNAN SEETHARAMAN^Î n the early days of computing, computers operated independently of one another with no communication between them. The hardware and the system software were proprietary and supplied by a single vendor. The software applications were usually custom-developed for specific purposes. Data sharing between systems was minimal and done the oldfashioned way-by physically transporting tapes or other storage media from one system to the other. The next step was to connect the computers and devices in a network using proprietary protocols for data communications. This was followed by the development of standard protocols and open systems. The era of open systems also led to system integration in which the customers could choose various hardware components from different vendors and integrate them to create a custom configuration suiting their computing needs and cost requirements. Hardware itself was designed and built using off-the-shelf components-microprocessors, memory chips, and other such basic building blocks.

A middleware-independent model and language for component distribution

“…This is in contrast to classical distributed component models, like e.g. Enterprise JavaBeans [EJB01], CORBA [CACM98, Se98] and DCOM [Sz97], which impose for local use a high memory footprint overhead, and either a considerable invocation overhead or, like EJB 2.0, doubled interfaces with a differing semantics. The distributed component language CompJava presents a platform-and middleware-independent approach for distributed component programming, since it is based on Java and abstracts from the middleware that is used to implement the distribution.…”

“…Classical component models, like Enterprise JavaBeans[EJB01] [MH00], CORBA [CACM98][Se98], Corba Component Model[CC], and DCOM[Sz97], are typically distributed models that provide a remote interface also for collocated access. The collocated invocation overhead may be eliminated for CORBA by collocation optimization[SWV99] [PRSGWK99] that is performed a posteriori by the object request broker (ORB), or a priori for EJB 2.0 [EJB01] by providing local interfaces in addition to the remote interfaces.…”

XML, bioinformatics and data integration

“…• The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) (Siegel, 1996;Achard and Barillot, 1997;Seetharaman, 1998;Siegel, 1998;Vinoski, 1998).…”

PCB—A Distributed Computing System in CORBA

“…In other words, CORBA enables a portable, object-oriented, interoperable code that is hardware, operating system, network, and programming language independent. Thus CORBA promotes many new technologies, such as standard tools and libraries that can be bought off the shelf and code that can be reused and interchanged [26,28].…”