TABLE OF CONTENTS This chapter deals with the fundamental concepts of CORBA (see [28]). This chapter could have been written using any middleware technology; however, we have chosen CORBA because of its maturity and significance in the marketplace. The specification for CORBA, published by the OMG, is based on an object model described in the Object Management Architecture (OMA). We start by looking at the characteristics of the OMA in Section 3.1 and then those of CORBA in Section 3.2. Those sections provide a high-level overview of CORBA. While this part is more theoretical, it will provide the foundation for the rest of the chapter that is devoted to CORBA from the view of an applications programmer. Section 3.3 demonstrates the development process of a CORBA application. A complete CORBA application, based on the bank account scenario introduced in the last chapter, is then presented in Section 3.4.
ORB, productindependent introduction to CORBA This chapter is an introduction to CORBA, and presents all the back-ground information necessary for understanding the material presented in the subsequent chapters. The view of CORBA presented corresponds to that of an applications programmer and is largely independent of Mico. It should be pointed out that the explanations in this chapter by no means cover all aspects of CORBA. Readers should refer to secondary literature for further information (for example, see [14]). Although we only dedicate one chapter to the introduction to CORBA, it also features a complete CORBA application written in C++ and Java.
