About CORBA

CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture model, offers a well-supported international standard for cross-platform, cross-language development. CORBA supports cross-language development by specifying a neutral language, Interface Definition Language (IDL), in which you develop specifications for the interfaces that the application objects expose.

CORBA 2.0 supports cross-platform development by specifying a transport mechanism, IIOP, that allows different operating systems running on very different hardware to interoperate. IIOP supplies a common "software" bus that, together with an ORB running on each system, makes data and request transfer transparent to the application developer.

Although the CORBA standard was developed and promulgated just before the advent of Java, and is a standard focused on component development in a heterogeneous application development environment, incorporating systems and languages of varying age and sophistication, it is perfectly possible to develop CORBA applications solely in Java. CORBA and Java are a good match.

For CORBA developers, JServer offers the following services and tools:

• A Java Transaction Service (JTS) interface to the OMG Object Transaction Service (OTS).

• A CosNaming implementation for publishing objects to an Oracle8i database, and for retrieving and activating them.

• A version of the IIOP protocol that supports the JServer session-based ORB. This session IIOP protocol is completely compatible with standard IIOP.

• A wide range of tools that assist in developing CORBA applications. There are tools that:
  • load Java classes and resource files to the database

  • drop loaded classes

  • publish objects to the CosNaming service

  • manage the session name space

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