The CORBA Reference Guide: Understanding the Common Object Request Broker Architecture

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a pivotal technology that facilitates and promotes the development of distributed applications. CORBA has taken a stronghold in the computer industry, primarily because it is a standard architecture that provides common interfaces and descriptions for objects. The emergence of CORBA has been a blessing to the programming community-now there is a framework in which distributed object-oriented applications for many different systems can be more easily constructed. This book offers you the clear explanation of CORBA that you need and provides a complete reference to the standard. The CORBA Reference Guide provides a general background in distributed systems, a technology that is vital for building scalable distributed object systems. The book explains the base architecture as well as the services and facilities that extend this architecture. This explanation also provides historical context discussing why certain features were selected.

Of particular note, this book details the most sophisticated security framework developed for any architecture to date. The book also covers interoperability with other ORBs, especially between OLE and CORBA. Additionally, key details about the Object Data Management Group (ODMG) Standard are included.

Distributed systems managers will gain a better understanding of CORBA by quickly reading the first section of each chapter and browsing the informative margin notes. Software architects and project leaders will appreciate the in-depth explanations of the various interfaces and the rationale behind CORBA.

Alan LaMont Pope began programming in 1970 on a PDP 8/L and an IBM 360. Beginning in the early 1970s, he worked in information systems for various Fortune 500 companies. In 1989, Alan was part of a joint team from Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems that built the Distributed Object Management Framework, which OMG selected as the Common Object Request Broker Architecture. He is currently President of Parliament Hill Software, Inc., which specialized in large scale distributed Java applications.

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