Overview

This chapter presents a guided tour through MICO to get you going with your first MICO application. We assume you have successfully installed MICO on your system and are now eager to write your first program. Some C++ knowledge is required to understand the programs. In Section 3.1, we describe part of the rationale behind CORBA, and in Section 3.2 we briefly describe some of the terminology used in CORBA. This should give you a rough idea of what CORBA is all about. Note that this description does not explain everything there is to know about CORBA.

The various subsections of Section 3.3 give you a hands-on example of how to use MICO for a simple client/server application. It is probably a good idea to go successively through all examples. In Section 3.3.1, we present a stand-alone C++ program that does not use MICO at all. In Section 3.3.2, we rewrite the application using MICO for the communication between the client and the server side. In this second stage of our tutorial, the complete application still runs in one address space. Finally, in Section 3.3.3, we show how to separate the client from the server and make them run in different address spaces or even on different hosts using the network for communication.

3.1 Objects in Distributed Systems

Modern programming languages employ the object paradigm to structure computation within a single operating system process. The next logical step is to distribute a computation over multiple processes on a...