Corba Fundamentals   «Prev  Next»
Lesson 1

Introduction to CORBA Fundamentals

The Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) is a middleware standard created by the Object Management Group (OMG) to enable communication between software objects, regardless of where they are located or which programming language they are written in. Its primary goal was to provide language-independent and platform-independent interoperability in distributed systems.
Although CORBA has largely been replaced in modern systems by lighter frameworks such as gRPC and REST/HTTP+JSON, it remains an important part of distributed computing history and is still found in legacy environments. This lesson introduces its key architectural elements.

Core Components of CORBA

  1. Object Request Broker (ORB): The ORB is the communication backbone. It receives client requests, locates the appropriate server object, and delivers responses as if the call were local.
  2. Interface Repository (IR): A runtime database of interface definitions. It ensures client requests match server capabilities and allows dynamic discovery of object interfaces.
  3. Interface Definition Language (IDL): A language-neutral way to describe object interfaces. Compilers map IDL definitions into language-specific stubs and skeletons, allowing heterogeneous systems to interoperate.
  4. Portable Object Adapter (POA): Connects application objects to the ORB. It manages object lifecycles, request dispatching, and object references.
  5. Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII) and Dynamic Skeleton Interface (DSI): Allow runtime request construction and handling, enabling flexible dynamic method calls without compile-time stubs.
  6. Common Services: Naming Service (resolve human-readable names), Trading Service (find objects by capability), Event Service (publish/subscribe messaging), Security Service (authentication and access control), and Transaction Service (distributed transaction management).
  7. Interoperability Protocols: The General Inter-ORB Protocol (GIOP) defines ORB communication. Its most common implementation, IIOP, runs over TCP/IP, enabling ORBs from different vendors to interoperate.

Together, these pieces provided CORBA’s promise of cross-language, cross-platform interoperability for distributed object systems.

Course Goals

In this module, you will learn:

  1. How CORBA works in principle and practice.
  2. The basic CORBA architecture and specifications.
  3. How CORBA clients and servers are structured.

The focus is on understanding the fundamentals while recognizing its role as a legacy technology and how modern alternatives have emerged.

Discussion Topics

Key topics we will cover in this course include:

  1. Structure of CORBA clients and servers.
  2. The Object Management Group and its role in defining standards.
  3. The CORBA specification and Object Management Architecture.
  4. CORBAservices and CORBAfacilities.
  5. Internet Inter-ORB Protocol (IIOP) and interoperability.
  6. IDL (Interface Definition Language) and its mapping to programming languages.
  7. Vendor compliance and perspectives on interoperability and services.

While studying these topics, remember that CORBA provides historical insight into distributed system design. Many of its principles—such as language neutrality and service discovery—are still reflected in modern architectures.


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