A CORBA Based Web Server
Distributed Computing Meets The Web
By Jaimin Mehta
Distributed objects enhance security, fault tolerance, configuration management, and code reuse. It's possible to take advantage of these attractive qualities by incorporating existing information services into a Web server based on the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) open industry standard for distributed objects.
In this article, I examine the case of a large airline company. The example is based on an actual Web server that uses CORBA as an intermediate service agent for indirection, and to allow existing applications to be "wrapped" as objects. This architecture demonstrates that a reusable, object-oriented API can serve as a gateway to existing services. The example is based on the capabilities of Expersoft's CORBA 2.0-compliant ORB. I'll assume readers have a working knowledge of HTTP/HTML (Web), distributed computing, and object-oriented technology.
CORBA in Brief
The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) put forth by the Object Management Group (OMG) combines distributed processing with object orientation. It is the world's first multivendor, industry-supported, distributed-object standard. CORBA provides a standard, seamless, transparent way to distribute objects across multiple platforms and operating systems. The architecture is isolated from the actual transport protocols (like TCP, IPX, and SNA), allowing an open-ended standard.
Current technologies for implementing distributed systems include sockets, remote procedure calls (RPCs), a distributed computing environment (DCE), or middleware oriented methods (MOMs).
