CORBA Based Design and Implementation of Universal Personal Computing

Universal personal computing (UPC) supports nomadic computing at user mobility and at terminal mobility levels in a userfriendly way. That is, a user can access computing resources anywhere on the Internet, using any available mobile or stationary terminal attached to any subnet supporting UPC services. These services are provided via agents and enable a personalized computing environment that is familiar to or customized by the user and independent of the terminal and subnet, utilizing locally available facilities. Hence, UPC requires a homogenous distributed processing environment. We selected CORBA as a natural platform-independent framework for UPC, and Java for the implementation of client side objects and agents of UPC. We developed our design of UPC services in SDL, the formal description technique of the ITU-T, and we used ObjectGEODE which is a commercially available tool set supporting object-oriented design and verification of systems. For the implementation of the prototype we selected Borland’s VisiBroker which supports Java implementation of the client objects.