EXPERIENCES DEVELOPING CORBA-BASED SERVICES

NEC Systems Laboratory's Open Systems Technology Center (OSTC) has bee n ABSTRACT prototyping and developing CORBA (Common Object Request Bro ker Architecture)-based object services for the past three years. Our emphasis has been on trying to design service architectures which can be implemented using any CORBA-compliant Object Request Broker (ORE), and to develop implementations of those services which are integrated with various popular commercial ORBs. OSTC has focused both on low-lev el object services which are useful to all CORBA applications, and on higher-level object services which are particularly useful to distribu ted system management, network management, and telecommunications appl ications. This paper will describe OSTC's efforts to design a complete framework architecture composed of a CORBA-compliant ORE and all comm on object services required by distributed system management, network management, and telecommunications applications. In addition to descri bing the proposed architecture, the paper will discuss OSTC's experien ces in attempting to integrate some of the services with various CORBA implementations. Particular attention will be paid to some of the pro blems we have encountered, most having to do with the lack of portabil ity of object service code between various CORBA implementations. In a ddition to identifying the problem, some proposed solutions will be de scribed, including the specification of a client-side portability laye r we have developed to improve the portability of client code between various CORBA environments.