What are the general specifications for the Corba course project?
Our course project for CORBA Fundamentals I is to develop the architecture and define the requirements for an application called SmartParts.
The SmartParts application is illustrated in the image below. SmartParts contains many of the issues associated with real-world CORBA projects.

SmartParts will consist of a central CORBA Server written in Java running on the Unix Operating System.
The SmartParts server will interact with

1. an existing Pricing Database,
2. a Legacy Parts Reordering application, and
3. a real-time Parts Inventory data feed.

There will be two clients^[1]

1. a Java applet and
2. a C++ application

that will run primarily on Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 Server Operating Systems.

Some of the real-world aspects of SmartParts include:

1. Application Component running on different operating systems
2. Multilanguage clients
3. Legacy applications that must be built into the new system, often called a wrapper
4. Allowing CORBA usage when using Java applets

The next module will be spent learning some of the terminology and basic components of CORBA before we begin the course project.

[1]Client: A client is the requesting program or user in a client/server relationship.