Java clearly introduces a new model of distributed application development for the Web. It makes the Web clients smarter and more interactiv...
Java clearly introduces a new model of distributed application development for the Web. It makes the Web clients smarter and more interactive. It allows developers to create platform-independent client applications for mass distribution over the Internet. The server is able to distribute some of its function to the client in the form of applets that it controls, but it is still primarily an HTTP/CGI server engine. CGI is a slow, cumbersome, and stateless protocol. It is not a good match for object-oriented Java clients. The idea is to create an open Web server environment based on CORBA. This makes a lot of sense because CORBA is a distributed object bus built with open standards; It was designed from the start to support intergalactic client/server systems.
What CORBA does for the Web?
Augmenting the Web infrastructure with CORBA provides three immediate benefits:
(1) It gets rid of the CGI bottleneck on the server ;
(2) It provides a scalable and robust server-to-server Web infrastructure;
(3) It extends Java with a distributed object infrastructure.
What CORBA does for the Web?
Augmenting the Web infrastructure with CORBA provides three immediate benefits:
(1) It gets rid of the CGI bottleneck on the server ;
(2) It provides a scalable and robust server-to-server Web infrastructure;
(3) It extends Java with a distributed object infrastructure.
- CORBA avoids CGI bottlenecks. It allows clients to directly invoke methods on a server. The client passes the parameters directly using precompiled stubs, or it generates them “on-the-fly” using CORBA’s dynamic invocation services. CGI doest not maintain state between client invocations; CORBA does.
- CORBA provides a scalable server-to-server infrastructure. Pools of server business objects can communicate using the CORBA ORB. These objects can run on multiple servers to provide load balancing for incoming client requests. CORBA allows the server objects to act in unison using transaction boundaries and related CORBA services.
- CORBA extends Java with a distributed object infrastructure. Currently Java applets cannot communicate across address spaces using remote method invocations. This means that there is no easy way for a Java applet to invoke a method on a remote object. CORBA allows Java applets to communicate with other objects written different languages across address spaces and networks. In addition, CORBA provides a rich set of distributed object services that augment Java- including metadata, transactions, security, naming, trader, and persistence.
