CORBA, or Common Object Request Broker Architecture, is a standard architecture for distributed object systems. It allows a distributed, heterogeneous collection of objects to interoperate.
The Object Management Group (OMG) is responsible for defining CORBA. The OMG comprises over 700 companies and organizations, including almost all the major vendors and developers of distributed object technology, including platform, database, and application vendors as well as software tool and corporate developers.
CORBA defines an architecture for distributed objects. The basic CORBA paradigm is that of a request for services of a distributed object. Everything else defined by the OMG is in terms of this basic paradigm.
The ORB
The ORB is the distributed service that implements the request to the remote object. It locates the remote object on the network, communicates the request to the object, waits for the results and when available communicates those results back to the client.
The ORB implements location transparency. Exactly the same request mechanism is used by the client and the CORBA object regardless of where the object is located. It might be in the same process with the client, down the hall or across the planet. The client cannot tell the difference.
The ORB implements programming language independence for the request. The client issuing the request can be written in a different programming language from the implementation of the CORBA object. The ORB does the necessary translation between programming languages. Language bindings are defined for all popular programming languages.
CORBA as a Standard for Distributed Objects
One of the goals of the CORBA specification is that clients and object implementations are portable. The CORBA specification defines an application programmer's interface (API) for clients of a distributed object as well as an API for the implementation of a CORBA object. This means that code written for one vendor's CORBA product could, with a minimum of effort, be rewritten to work with a different vendor's product. However, the reality of CORBA products on the market today is that CORBA clients are portable but object implementations need some rework to port from one CORBA product to another.
CORBA 2.0 added interoperability as a goal in the specification. In particular, CORBA 2.0 defines a network protocol, called IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol), that allows clients using a CORBA product from any vendor to communicate with objects using a CORBA product from any other vendor. IIOP works across the Internet, or more precisely, across any TCP/IP implementation.
Interoperability is more important in a distributed system than portability. IIOP is used in other systems that do not even attempt to provide the CORBA API. In particular, IIOP is used as the transport protocol for a version of Java RMI (so called "RMI over IIOP"). Since EJB is defined in terms of RMI, it too can use IIOP. Various application servers available on the market use IIOP but do not expose the entire CORBA API. Because they all use IIOP, programs written to these different API's can interoperate with each other and with programs written to the CORBA API.
CORBA Services
Another important part of the CORBA standard is the definition of a set of distributed services to support the integration and interoperation of distributed objects. As depicted in the graphic below, the services, known as CORBA Services or COS, are defined on top of the ORB. That is, they are defined as standard CORBA objects with IDL interfaces, sometimes referred to as "Object Services."
There are several CORBA services. The popular ones are described in detail in another module of this course. Below is a brief description of each:
Service Description
Object life cycle Defines how CORBA objects are created, removed, moved, and copied
Naming Defines how CORBA objects can have friendly symbolic names
Events Decouples the communication between distributed objects
Relationships Provides arbitrary typed n-ary relationships between CORBA objects
Externalization Coordinates the transformation of CORBA objects to and from external media.
Transactions Coordinates atomic access to CORBA objects
Concurrency Control Provides a locking service for CORBA objects in order to ensure serializable access
Property Supports the association of name-value pairs with CORBA objects
Trader Supports the finding of CORBA objects based on properties describing the service offered by the object
Query Supports queries on objects
CORBA Products
CORBA is a specification; it is a guide for implementing products. Several vendors provide CORBA products for various programming languages. The CORBA products that support the Java programming language include:
ORB and its Description
The Java 2 ORB : The Java 2 ORB comes with Sun's Java 2 SDK. It is missing several features.
VisiBroker for Java A popular Java ORB from Inprise Corporation. VisiBroker is also embedded in other products. For example, it is the ORB that is embedded in the Netscape Communicator browser.
OrbixWeb:A popular Java ORB from Iona Technologies.
WebSphere: A popular application server with an ORB from IBM.
Netscape Communicator: Netscape browsers have a version of VisiBroker embedded in them. Applets can issue request on CORBA objects without downloading ORB classes into the browser. They are already there.
Various free or shareware ORBs: CORBA implementations for various languages are available for download on the web from various sources.
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