Introduction to CORBA

This chapter provides an inside view of CORBA (Object Request Broker Architecture) with details of its different elements such as the CORBA reference object model and the Object Management Architecture (OMA). It also goes into details on some of the major elements of the CORBA architecture: Object Request Broker (ORB), Interface Definition Language (IDL), Interface and Implementation Repositories, and object adaptors. We show how object binding works in CORBA environments, and this is done by using either transient and persistent object references. At the end of the chapter, the CORBA technologies are compared with related technologies (e.g., DCE, DCOM and RMI).