A SITUATED EVALUATION OF THE OBJECT MANAGEMENT GROUPS (OMG) OBJECT MANAGEMENT ARCHITECTURE (OMA)

it has been difficult to objectively assess the real value or maturity of the Object Management Group's Object Management Architecture (OMA) . While experience reports have appeared in the literature these have focused more on the functionality of the end-system than on systematic ally exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the OMA, and providing practical guidelines on the effective use of the OMA for specific soft ware-engineering problems. In this paper we describe a case study in t he use of the OMA to integrate legacy software are components into a d istributed object system. We assess the OMA in this problem context, a nd indicate strengths and weaknesses of the specification and current implementations. We extrapolate our experience to a broader class of c omponent-based software systems, and recommend an architectural strate gy for the effective use of the OMA to this class of systems.