Supporting CORBA applications in a mobile environment
Mads Haahr, Raymond Cunningham, Vinny Cahill · 1999
CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, defines a framework for developing object-oriented distributed applications.Unfortunately, current implementations of CORBA have not been designed with support for mobile computers in mind.Using CORBA in a mobile environment raises a number of problems due to hardware mobility and the characteristics of wireless networks.This paper identifies and discusses these problems and presents the design and implementation of our Architecture for Location Independent CORBA Environments (ALICE).ALICE allows CORBA objects running on mobile devices to interact transparently with objects hosted by off-the-shelf CORBA implementations.Importantly, ALICE allows server as well as client objects to reside on mobile hosts without relying on a centralised location register to keep track of their whereabouts.1 introduction CORBA, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture [7], from the Object Management Group (OMG), defines a framework for developing object-oriented distributed applications.CORBA is based on the clientserver paradigm and the most important component in the architecture is the Object Request Broker (ORB) which is responsible for relaying object invocations from clients to server objects.Initially, the CORBA standard made no provision for interoperability between ORBS supplied by different vendors.Later versions of the standard addressed this issue by defining a standard protocol for inter-ORB communication which is known as the General Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP) [7, Chapter 131 and which can PeMkion to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work t'or PCrSOnal Or ChirOOnl use is granted without fee provided that comicare not made or distributed for profit or commercial advarltage and that copies bear this notice and the f'ull citation on the first page.ho copy otheRvise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists.rcquircs prior specific permission and/or a fee.