Accessing CORBA Obejcts on the Web

With the emergence of distributed object technology, there is an increasing agreement that the benefits of distributed object technology should be brought to the World Wide Web. The work presented in this paper is an attempt to integrate CORBA objects into the Web. We propose a URI scheme for addressing CORBA objects. A URI for an object not only identifies the object but may also optionally include the name of the method to be invoked on the object and the parameters required. We have implemented the URI scheme by extending Sun Microsystems' HotJava browser and also by implementing a proxy server that acts as a protocol level gateway between CORBA and HTTP. With this kind of integration, different web services can be described using CORBA, thereby making the Web extensible for different needs and bringing the richness of distributed objects to the web.