Injecting Management

Object Infrastructure Framework The goal of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation’s (MCC) Object Infrastructure Project (OIP) is to simplify the development and evolution of distributed, object-oriented applications. OIP is designing an architecture for distributed systems (a set of rules for distributed, component-based systems to follow) and implementing frameworks. (Such are examples of Object Infrastructure Frameworks, or OIF.) Particular frameworks are implemented for different computational environments. OIP follows the CORBA model of organizing distributed systems. In CORBA, an object that wants to offer services to other objects describes these services in Interface Definition Language (IDL). IDL primarily specifies available methods and their type signatures. An IDL compiler compiles an application’s IDL into the definition of a set of proxies. In CORBA, a remote ("server") object is represented on a local address space by a proxy object (the "stub"). When a process on the local machine (the "client") wants to invoke a remote method on the server, it makes a call to the stub. The stub encodes the call to the server and pushes the encoding over the network towards the server. At the server end, there is a corresponding proxy object (the "skeleton") for decoding the remote calls and invoking the actual service. (The skeleton and stub cooperate in the corresponding manner for returning values.) This process is illustrated in Figure 1. Conceptually, OIP extends this architecture by providing an additional language