The Broker Architectural Framework

According to Andrew S. Tanenbaum distributed systems have a significant drawback: “Distributed systems need radically different software than do centralized systems”. This is the major technical reason for consortias such as the Object Management Group (OMG) or the Open Software Foundation (OSF) and companies such as Microsoft developing their own technologies for distributed computing. Platforms such as Microsoft OLE 2.x (OLE = Object Linking and Embedding), OSF DCE (Distributed Computing environment) and OMG CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) share the use of a common software architecture from which we have abstracted the Broker architectural framework. There are three groups of developers who will benefit from our description of the Broker pattern: • Developers working with an existing Broker system who are interested in understanding the architecture of such systems, • Developers who want to implement lean versions of a Broker system, without all the bells and whistles of a full-blown OLE or CORBA, • Developers who plan to implement a full-fledged Broker system and need an in-depth description of the Broker architecture.