Distributed Object Technology, Business Information Systems

With the development of network technology, the transferring speed of network has been accelerated. Thus, we have more and more new applications based on the Internet. Among all these applications, the most brilliant one is electronic commerce (E-Commerce). E-Commerce is attracting lots of enterprises and customers' attention for its advantages such as convenience, promptness and efficiency. Now, computer researchers face a new challenge, that is, how to develop a new management information system (MIS) for business enterprises, which can not only meet the needs of E-Commerce but also compatible with the existed software systems of a business enterprise.As a kind of specification for distributed objects, CORBA itself has the advantages of distributed computing and object-oriented technology. Therefore, CORBA can be applied into developing E-Commerce applications, which mainly concerned with the interaction in heterogeneous environment. In addition, CORBA's Object Request Broker is somewhat like a kind of software bus. It can easily integrate new software components and existed systems into a new software system. Hence, CORBA is a good solution to the problem mentioned above.First and foremost, this thesis analyzes the requirements of a typical business enterprise and creates the abstract model for a business enterprise. Then, after describing a variety of MIS, this thesis comes to the conclusion that distributed object technology is a good solution to E-Commerce. Next, this thesis introduces distributed computing and object-oriented technology while emphasizing on CORBA specification. Finally, with the methodology and tools of distributed object technology, this thesis analyzes, designs and builds a new business MIS which can adapt to E-Commerce.