ON THE CODE DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM OF RPC AND CORBA APPLICATIONS

Generally, after the design phase, code development for distributed ap plications in RPC or in CORBA remote object call mode includes five st eps: (1) develop the client and server application-related code; (2) s pecify the client-server communication protocol; (3) compile the proto col definition; (4) migrate the servers, server stubs and other relate d components to remote machines; and (5) make the client and servers e xecutable. All of these steps except (1) are, in fact, irrelevant to c oding the application. These unrelated steps are time-consuming and er ror-prone and require additional learning, increasing the development time and cost of distributed applications. In this paper, we propose a simplified code development paradigm for RPC- and CORBA-style distrib uted applications. In this paradigm a programmer focuses only on codin g the application itself. In other words, the code development style i s nearly the same as that of centralized applications. The mechanism o f the computing environment to the proposed paradigm is described. An example explaining the implementation details of the computing environ ment for RPC applications is also presented. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.