Research And Implementation Of COM And CORBA Bridging Technology In Middleware Architectures

With the popularization of distributed computing, as the key technology for resolving the problem of distributed isomerism, middleware is developed rapidly. Presently, communication among middleware architectures is a development trend in distributed computing. As two main middleware architectures, COM and CORBA are used in more extensive areas. How to process interoperability between them has attracted more and more attentions. In many domains, the functions of COM and CORBA are overlapped, especially on enterprise integrations. Many large-scale distributed applications are designed to use both COM and CORBA, under this case, the interoperability between COM and CORBA is especially important. This dissertation focuses on the researches of interoperability between COM and CORBA.First, this dissertation analyses COM and CORBA through comparison approach to extrude their similarities and differences. Based on them, the incompatibilities are resolved by bi-directional mapping between the two interface define languages, which comes down to basic data type and construct data type. Then implement a local bridge unit and a remote bridge unit between COM and CORBA according to the bridging relationship provided by the inter-working object model and the location where the bridge unit situates. The bridge unit utilizes two views object to offer service for COM objects and CORBA objects. The COM view is a COM object, which implements the CORBA object interfaces, thus it has the functions of CORBA object, by analogy, the CORBA view is a CORBA object that implements the COM object interfaces and has the functions as well as the CORBA object. In addition, in order to use the bridge unit in distributed environment, the COM object must be provided with distributed operation capabilities. Therefore, this paper also makes bi-directional mapping between the CORBA protocols and DCOM protocols, so that the interoperable process can shield the bottom details and offer service for clients transparently. The testing results show that the performance of the bridge unit reaches the comparative perfect desirability.Implementation of the bridge unit affords advantages for interoperability between COM objects and CORBA objects. Not only between COM and CORBA, also among other middleware architectures the researches of interoperability will gradually be introduced on schedule. These will impulse the evolution of the distributed computing effectively, and have momentous significance to resolve the problem of isomer in distributed environment.