Abstract
Current mappings of IDL to implementation languages such as C++ or Java use CORBA specific data-types, which makes it imperative for an object implementation to be CORBA-compliant. While being completely CORBA-compliant ensures portability and interoperability, several classes of enterprise applications may only require interoperability with other CORBA applications. Other applications may be constrained by such factors as a large existing code-base or a widely used communication protocol. In many cases, these applications can benefit from the concise expressiveness of IDL without committing to the overhead of using a general-purpose CORBA ORB. To aid this process, we propose a new approach to ORB design where the IDL mapping and ORB protocol is completely configurable. As a motivation, we present our use of IDL in the development of a large in-house application. In this application, all interfaces are specified using IDL, which is mapped to C++ using a custom mapping. We then present an architecture for a template-driven IDL compiler and describe the implementation of a prototype we built. With this compiler architecture, an IDL mapping can easily be specified and customized by writing an appropriate template.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Object Management Group, Inc., The Common Object Request Broker: Architecture and Specification, Aug. 1996. Document PTC/96-08-04, Revision 2.0. 396, 411
E. Eide, K. Frei, B. Ford, J. Lepreau, and G. Lindstrom, “Flick: A flexible, optimizing compiler,” in Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, (Las Vegas, Nevada, USA), June 1997. 399, 412
S. O’Malley, T. Proebsting, and A. Montz, “USC: A universal stub compiler,” in Proceedings of the Conference on Communication Architectures, Protocols and Applications (SIGCOMM), (London, UK), Aug. 1994. 399
M. Ott, G. Michelitsch, D. Reininger, and G. Welling, “An architecture for adaptive QoS and its application to multimedia systems design,” Computer Communications, vol. 21, pp. 334–349, Feb. 1998. 400
Object Oriented Concepts, Inc., OmniBroker. http://www.ooc.com/ob/. 400
Sun Microsystems, Inc., Java Remote Method Invocation Specification. http://java.sun.com/products/jdk/rmi/index.html. 401, 412
S. Srinivasan, “Template-driven code generation,” in Advanced Perl Programming, ch. 17, O’Reilly Associates, Inc., Aug. 1997. 406, 408
A. Singhai, A. Sane, and R. H. Campbell, “Quarterware for middleware,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), May 1998. 411
B. Dumant, F. Horn, F. D. Tran, and J.-B. Stefani, “Jonathan: An open distributed processing environment in Java,” in Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing (Middleware’ 98), (The Lake District, England), Sept. 1998. 411
D. C. Schmidt and C. Cleeland, “Applying patterns to develop extensible and maintainable ORB middleware,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 40, no. 12, 1997. 411
F. Kon and R. H. Campbell, “Supporting automatic configuration of componentbased distributed system,” in Proceedings of the USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies (COOTS), (San Diego, California, USA), May 1999. 411
M. Roman, F. Kon, and R. H. Campbell, “Design and implementation of runtime reflection in communication middleware: the dynamicTAO case,” in Proceedings of the ICDCS’ 99 Workshop on Middleware, (Austin, Texas, USA), May 1999. 411
G. Hamilton, M. L. Powell, and J. G. Michell, “Subcontract: A flexible base for distributed programming,” in Proceedings of the 14th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, (Asheville, North Carolina, USA), Dec. 1993. 411
G. Welling and M. Ott, “Structuring remote object systems for mobile hosts with intermittent connectivity,” in Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), May 1998. 411
IONA Technologies, The ORBIX Architecture. http://www.iona.com/products/orbix/. 412
Visigenic, Inc., The New Application Architecture, Version 3.0, 1997. 412
XEROX Corporation, ILU Reference Manual. http://pubweb.parc.xerox.com/hypertext/ilu/index.html. 412
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Welling, G., Ott, M. (2000). Customizing IDL Mappings and ORB Protocols. In: Sventek, J., Coulson, G. (eds) Middleware 2000. Middleware 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1795. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45559-0_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45559-0_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-67352-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45559-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive