CORBA Interoperability
Zahir Tari PhD, Omran Bukhres PhD · 2001
CORBA specification provides a list of guidelines for implementing ORB products. The concrete realization of these guidelines is left to ORB vendors to fill. All CORBA compliant ORB products follow the same guidelines, but have different implementation details from each other. In the earlier versions of CORBA standard (CORBA 1), some aspects of the ORB such as low-level protocols used for inter-ORB communication were left unspecified. As a result, ORBs of different vendors were not always able to communicate with each other. OMG realized this problem and issued an RFP (Request For Proposal) asking vendors to submit proposals to standardize the inter-ORB communication. A specification called Universal Net-worked Object (UNO) was adopted and has been revised several times ever since. This specification introduces concepts such as domains, bridges, interoperability protocols, and Interoperable Object References (IOR). This chapter describes the OMG's interoperability standard. An overview of the interoperability issues is presented. Sections of the chapter provide details about domains, bridges, interoperability protocols, and IOR. The aim of this chapter is to provide additional technical details to the ones proposed in Chapters 2, 3, and 4. This chapter does not provide a complete cover of the topic related to the issue of CORBA interoperability. Points which are deemed to be important are discussed in more detail.