How to Make Corba Objects User-Friendly with a Generic Object-Oriented Dynamic Environment?

The future of distributed client/server computing will consist of the WWW and Corba environments. First, the WWW is the user-friendly uniform interface to access any distributed resource. Second, Corba is a single uniform object-oriented view of distributed and heterogeneous systems integration. Then these two worlds need to merge to make distributed objects user-friendly. This paper rst presents Corba and our Generic Object-Oriented Dynamic Environment, second it discusses the interests of the integration between the WWW and Corba worlds, and nally presents Cor-baWeb as an integration tool between the WWW and Corba worlds. The Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) 8] is a standardized distributed object-oriented infrastructure to support components interoper-ability, portability and reusability. Currently, several Corba implementations are available and could interoperate. Many major industrial projects target to use Corba to develop their next information systems. The Motorola's project IRIDIUM is a large distributed information system modelizing telecommunications satellites as a set of Corba objects. Boeing plans to redesign its manufacturing information system on the Iona's Corba implementation Orbix. Moreover, some USA government organizations keep watch on Corba to build their future inter-operable information systems. In all these examples , Corba seems to be the long-term choice of the distributed computing infrastructure. Corba is a key technology to provide application interoperability and integration. Each component or object is described by an interface , a set of operations and attributes, written with the Interface Deenition Language (IDL). An IDL description is compiled to produce a stub code for client programs and a skeleton code for server objects. IDL can be mapped to diierent programming languages, currently C, C++, Smalltalk, Java, Ada95 and a lot more in the future. Thus, an object communicates with others via requests transported by the Object Request Broker (ORB). The Orb isolates client programs from server objects. Besides client programs and server objects are isolated from the Orb via respectively IDL stubs and IDL skeletons. With this static approach, a client program which wants to communicate with hundred diierent object types needs to include the hundred appropriate IDL stub codes at compilation time. Now, let us imagine a general object browser application: this tool permits users to inspect any object. But at compilation time the browser designer cannot know all millions of object types which will be browsed at runtime. For this kind of application, Corba includes two powerful tools: the Interface Repository and …