CORBA Components

CORBA stands for Common Object Request Broker Architecture, which is an open, vendor-independent architecture and component infrastructure for computer applications working in a networking or distributed environment. Using the standard protocol IIOP and ORB, a CORBA component is both vendor neutral and platform independent, which means a CORBA component from any vendor can work well with other CORBA components from other vendors on any computers or operating systems, regardless of what programming languages have been used to implement those CORBA components. CORBA Component Model (CCM) is an open standard introduced in CORBA 3.x for component based software development. CCM has significantly reduced the software complexity, making it easier to adapt, maintain, extend, or aggregate software components. A CCM component interface exposes all its ports. It has facets, receptacles, event sources, event sinks, and configurable attributes. It is easy to connect multiple CCM components by their ports. CCM also provides a standard facility to support component packaging, assembling, and deployment. This chapter discusses how to design, implement, package, deploy, execute, and reuse CCM components. OpenCCM is used as a reference implementation of CCM in our discussion.