OPEN EDEN: a Portable Fault Tolerant CORBA Architecture

This paper presents the design of OPEN EDEN, an implementation of the Fault Tolerant CORBA specification based on the use of a group communication system, called EDEN. The design of OPEN EDEN has been driven by the desire to use only portable techniques (mainly portable interceptors) to implement the interaction between the EDEN group communication system and CORBA. The EDEN system itself is built by configuring, assembling and deploying components connected to a generic agreement component that implements a consensus algorithm. The resulted platform is particularly portable, since it can be easily migrated to different architectures, and transparent for applications programmers, since requests to a replicated service are transparently intercepted and redirected to the EDEN system. We discuss the main difficulties we encountered and we draw some conclusions about the adequacy of our choices.