DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A STATIC BRIDGE BETWEEN COM AND CORBA DISTRIBUTED OBJECTS

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Chitra, A. | Sadasivam, G. Sudha

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore - 641 004, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract: The distributed object standards Component Object Model (COM) and Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) apply object technology to design and use software components. While COM forms a good front end for the Microsoft Systems, CORBA is well suited for middle tier and back end Unix servers. By integrating them, the user can get a combination of the best attributes of both the systems. Bridging software is needed to transparently couple components from both the systems. This paper discusses a static method of achieving COM/CORBA interworking using a generic IDL compiler. It maps the COM and CORBA IDLs onto an intermediate representation from which stubs and skeletons are generated. Further, threading is used to allow multiple COM clients to contact a single CORBA server using Internet Interoperable Protocol / Transmission Control Protocol (IIOP/TCP) as a communication medium. To improve the networking speed and to bring about multicasting, IIOP/UDP has also been tried as a communication medium. The Object Reference (OR) from the implementation repository (IMR) and the Object Identifier (OID) from the registry have also been cached to improve the speed of the name lookup mechanism.

Keywords: COM/CORBA interworking, static IDL compiler, cache, IIOP, thread

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 25-33, 2003