Introduction

CORBA is an acronym for Common Object Request Broker Architecture, a name that does not really convey to the new user the purpose of the technology. Most people just think of CORBA as the name of an important distributed object technology without really considering what the acronym stands for. For Java developers, RMI is generally the preferred distributed object architecture – especially when it is known that both client and server will be written in Java. However, CORBA has the advantage that it is language independent, meaning that non-Java clients can make CORBA calls to a CORBA server.

CORBA is a standard, so there is an official specification of that standard. The standard is maintained by the Object Management Group, a consortium of over 800 members. See the www.omg.org home page for voluminous information on CORBA and other technologies developed by the OMG. CORBA is also a very broad technology that covers much more than we introduce here. Our point is to demonstrate how CORBA technology can be used to implement straightforward distributed computing solutions analogous to the RMI example developed in Chapter 18.

A typical scientific application, such as the simulation described in Chapters 16 and 17, generally has only a few users. The developer writes both the client and server and, if developing in Java, probably uses RMI.