TABLE OF CONTENTS The final chapter provides an overview of some advanced aspects of CORBA as well as other topics unrelated to CORBA. We first discuss the CORBA Component Model in Section 10.1. This latest addition to the CORBA specification introduces the notion of components. In Section 10.2 we give a brief overview of Web Services that have become popular in recent years. We provide a brief comparison between Web Services and CORBA. Section 10.3 gives an introduction to a whole new class of middleware technologies middleware for ubiquitous computing. We provide an overview of this exciting area, which is still subject to active research endeavors.
CORBA 3.0 introduced the CORBA Component Model (CCM), which enables developers to implement fine-grained components, and then to assemble them into a component-based application.
This section begins with an introduction to component-based development. It then looks into the specifics of the CORBA Component Model. A brief example of using the CCM implementation in Mico is followed by an overview of the implementation's internals. The section then concludes with a discussion of CCM and future trends.
"Component" is a widely used and abused term not only in the world of software engineering. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, a component is "a constituent part," and in this meaning, the term is used for almost anything that is a part of something bigger.
The Unified Modeling Language (UML) provides a more meaningful definition:
"Component" definition A component represents a modular part of a...
