Juggler: A Management Service for CORBA Object Groups*

Since its initial specification, CORBA hás become a de Jacto standard for the development of object-oriented distributed applications. In spite of some important features such as support for interoperability and heterogeneity, the CORBA specification, until very recently, neither addressed object replication nor reliable communication between objects, which are key components to provide fault tolerance for distributed object systems. Some research projects have proposed and explored a few approaches that incorporate fault tolerance mechanisms in CORBA but most of the systems developed offer a rather basic support for managing groups of object réplicas. Our work builds upon one of these systems, called OGS [3]. On the top of it, we are developing Juggler, a distributed service that provides means for flexible and automatic management of CORBA replicated objects.