Corba Fundamentals   «Prev 

What is the Object Management Architecture?

The Object Management Architecture

  1. The CORBAservices are designed to provide object-level services that will commonly be needed across many applications.
  2. The CORBAfacilities are designed to provide application-level services such as system management, GUI services, and data translation services.
  3. The CORBAdomains (or Domain Interfaces) are defined by Special Interest groups (SIGs) within the OMG. These CORBAdomains specify services specific to vertical market focus areas such as medical, financial, etc.
  4. CORBA Application Objects are designed and developed by CORBA developers to meet the specific needs of their application.
  5. The ORB makes it possible for the objects and services to communicate.
Corba Fundamentals

What is the OMG?

The Object Management Group (OMG) is a not-for-profit organization that promotes the use of object-oriented technologies. Among other things, it defines the CORBA and UML standards. The OMG web site (www.omg.org) provides all of its standards documents available free-of-charge in the form of downloadable PDF files. The OMG has a relatively small staff that focuses on administrative tasks, such as maintaining the OMG web site and organizing meetings of its members. The work of defining standards is carried out by the members of the OMG, of which there are about 600. Any organization (or individual) that is interested in the work of the OMG can become a member. Member organizations typically include universities, software vendors and software users. Members can volunteer to take part in task forces that have the goal of defining new OMG standards or enhancing existing OMG standards. It is through this work that the OMG standards evolve in directions directed by the real-world concerns of its members.

Object Technology

As object technology became more popular through the 1980s there was more interest in bundling the concept of objects with the concept of transparent distributed computing. Objects, with their inherent combination of data and behavior and their strict separation of interface from implementation, offer an ideal package for distributing data and processes to end-user applications. Objects became an enabling technology for distributed processing. In the early 1990s an international trade association called the Object Management Group (OMG) defined a standard for the distribution of objects. The OMG defined the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), which provided a standard by which OT could be used in distributed computing environments. The latest version of this standard, CORBA 2.0, addresses issues related to interface, registration, databases, communication, and error handling. When combined with other object services defined by the OMG Object Management Architecture (OMA), CORBA becomes a middleware that facilitates full exploitation of object technology in a distributed system. However, if we were to characterize CORBA technology in the simplest possible language, it would be to say it is an object-oriented RPC.