CONSTRUCTING RELIABLE DISTRIBUTED COMMUNICATION-SYSTEMS WITH GORBA

Communication software and distributed services for next-generation ap plications must be reliable, efficient, flexible, and reusable. These requirements motivate the use of the Common Object Request Broker Arch itecture (CORBA). However, building highly available applications with CORBA is hard. Neither the CORBA standard nor conventional implementa tions of CORBA directly address complex problems related to distribute d computing, such as real-time or high-speed quality of service, parti al failures, group communication, and causal ordering of events. This article describes a CORBA-based framework that uses the Virtual Synchr ony model to support reliable data- and process-oriented distributed s ystems that communicate through synchronous methods and asynchronous m essaging.